Last year, the Jets faced the Texans in their season opener at Reliant Stadium with a rookie coach on the sideline and another rookie under center. Question marks abounded for a team that was underwhelming the season before, missing the playoffs with a future Hall of Famer as quarterback.
Fast forward a season and the Jets only question mark is if this team will live up to its Super Bowl potential. On Sunday, the Texans face a very different team under head coach Rex Ryan than the one they did in Week 1 of last year, yet the game might look very similar to last year’s performance.
“I see a team that’s improved a great deal,” Texans head coach Gary Kubiak said. “They’re winning in all kinds of ways right now.”
And that’s not necessarily a far cry from the Jets that Kubiak faced last year, albeit that was a team that was still reeling from a season which ended with New York losing four of their last five games to finish 9-7. The Jets entered this year with a loaded roster on offense and returned the vast core of last year’s top-rated defense. When Kubiak schemed for the Jets a season ago, it wasn’t this same confident bunch that turned it around after Rex broke down for a cry.
Instead, in that game, the Jets rode their rookie quarterback Mark Sanchez, who limited mistakes for 272 yards passing with one touchdown with an interception. And the Jets churned out 190 yards rushing to kick-start a ground attack that finished last year as best in the NFL. Currently, the Jets remain among the best rushing teams in the NFL, averaging a fourth-best in the league 150.7 yards per game.
But unlike last year, the 7-2 Jets are no longer an unknown quantity. They’ve won consecutive road games in overtime against feisty teams, giving this team a swagger on and off the field.
“I hope we’re lucky all the way to the Super Bowl because we’ll take it,” Ryan said. “You can make breaks, but it’s funny because the good teams are always the lucky teams.”
The Jets may be lucky, but Kubiak cautions that the team is good, too. The offense is far more polished even if it produces a similar boxscore to the game last September.
The offense has shown a penchant for big plays and at times, has been dominating this year. On Sunday against Cleveland, the Jets ran 97 offensive plays as they systematically moved down the field. It is a more savvy offense that the Jets boast this year than the one that surprised Kubiak’s defense last year.
“They run the football as good as anybody in the game. They have some big play receivers,” Kubiak said. “They have a young quarterback now, who has enough starts under his belt that he’s starting to do things that are exceptional from the standpoint that you win two overtime games on the road due to the way he has played in crunch time.”
