Offensive Game Plan vs. Dolphins Proves Jets Have No Faith in Geno Smith

The New York Jets' offensive game plan against the Miami Dolphins Monday night was clear from the start: Run the ball as much as possible and, in so doing, limit Geno Smith's opportunities to turn it over.

At 10 interceptions on the season heading into Monday, Smith wasn't leading the league, but he only had 245 passing attempts prior to Week 13. That's a pick every 24.5 passing attempts. 

Though Smith only attempted 13 passes in the Jets' loss, Rex Ryan and offensive coordinator Marty Mornhinweg still couldn't completely avert disaster. Smith attempted five passes on the Jets' final drive with less than two minutes to go in the fourth quarter, as New York trailed by three and hurriedly tried to at least get into field-goal range. 

But with 39 seconds to go, a pass attempt over the middle to Jeff Cumberland instead found its way into the hands of Miami's Reshad Jones, and it was all over. 

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about the Jets' impotent final drive is that it was so predictable. Can anyone really blame Ryan and Mornhinweg for a game plan that featured 49 rushing attempts to 13 passes, then?

The Jets apparently had such little faith in Smith prior to the start of the game that they deliberately did not include his name when introducing the starters, for fear he would have been booed—at home—according to Manish Mehta of the New York Daily News.  

It's not a recipe for success. The Jets' one-dimensional game plan, despite jumping out to a 10-point lead, became easy for the Dolphins to dismantle. Miami stacked eight and sometimes even nine defenders in the box, knowing it didn't have to fear Geno's arm. 

Sure, Chris Johnson and Chris Ivory finished the night with 105 and 62 rushing yards each, respectively, against a Miami run defense that had only been allowing an average of 104.2 per game prior to the matchup. But that strategy wasn't viable once New York fell behind, which it did in the fourth quarter. 

Once that happened, the Jets were unable to rely upon Smith and the passing attack to regain a lead. 

Total Plays	Rushing Attempts	% Rushing Plays	Passing Attempts	% Passing Plays
64	49	77%	13	20%

Michael Vick supplanted Smith as the starter in Week 9 against the Kansas City Chiefs. The three rapid-fire interceptions Smith threw against the Buffalo Bills in Week 8 were certainly a catalyst.

Vick led the Jets to their first win after eight consecutive losses in Week 10 against the Pittsburgh Steelers, but after his unsatisfactory play (once again against the Bills) in Week 12, New York made the decision to go back to Smith.

Ryan called it an organizational decision and stressed that it was "the best decision" for the Jets "at this time" and that there was no pressure from general manager John Idzik to move back to Smith, per Ben Shpigel of The New York Times.  

Brian Costello of the New York Post took it a step further and reported that Ryan wanted Smith back in the lineup for evaluation purposes for 2015. 

But asking your quarterback to attempt only 13 passes—five of them borne from necessity in a play-from-behind final drive situation—is a curious way to evaluate his future potential.

"I thought our game plan was good," Rex Ryan said in his postgame press conference, per the video below. "It was what we thought we wanted to do to win the game."

That says pretty much exactly what anyone needs to know about how much faith Ryan has in Smith. 

"You never want to feel like you can't be a part of the solution," Smith said after he was renamed the starter, via Kimberley A. Martin of Newsday. "Despite the record or where we're at right now, you want to always be out there with your teammates fighting and hoping to fix things."

But Smith can't be part of the solution when he's part of the problem. His lack of consistency is proving to be an obstacle the Jets may not be able to build around, as they can't know from one game plan to the next which Smith is going to show up. 

Even when he's on—such as in his season debut in the win against the Oakland Raiders in which he went 23-of-28 for 221 yards—the danger of an ill-timed interception always looms. In fact, he's only had one game this season without one. 

The 2-10 Jets "can't buy a win," as Ryan said in his presser, and it's unclear whether Ryan or Smith will return to the team next season. But if Smith got the starting job back for evaluation purposes, shouldn't the Jets use the remaining four games against the Minnesota Vikings, Tennessee Titans, New England Patriots and Dolphins to actually, well, evaluate him?

In the comments he made both after renaming Smith the starter and after the loss to the Dolphins, Ryan implied that the Jets can game-plan to win games, and they can game-plan to evaluate Smith's future potential, but not necessarily do both simultaneously.