Adam Gase revealed Wednesday that he'll hand off the offensive play-calling for the second consecutive game to coordinator Dowell Loggains this week. And Loggains said he's ready to roll with the decision to call the plays that will be needed to keep up with the Chiefs at Kanas City on Sunday.
"I just don't think it's a one-week thing," Gase said of passing the play-call duties to Loggains for last Sunday's game against Buffalo. "I've got to see this play out a little bit to where other things will pop up. There might be some other things that I notice that maybe I can get fixed that will help us do things better in the long run."
"In my mind it was never about who's calling our plays," Loggains said today in his first remarks to reporters of calling the plays that worked so well in the first half against the Bills and not as well in the second half. "That's not where our football is not clean right now. It goes back to practice, cleaning up fundamentals and techniques, making sure we're coaching our guys hard and putting them through the right situations. It was obviously something Coach Gase made the decision to do, he came and told me that was the direction he wanted to go."
Loggains said that while the game "didn't go the way we planned," that first half was something to make a young play-caller proud.
"When we got back in here and were watching all the tape, we were actually able to see how much better we still could be," he said. "We played our best half of football. It was clean, we were able to create balance. An area we obviously need to continue to work on is third down. In the second half, we didn't come out and play as well as we need to. And that starts with us as coaches and doing the things we need to do to continue to get better this week and build off the first half of last week."
Kansas City will be a difficult road to travel for Loggains, Sam Darnold and the Jets offense. As Loggains explained, when your defense is running up against an offense that is in the NFL's top ten in many yardage categories as well as averaging 31.1 points per game, your offense will be met by a defense that can take chances against you.
"They're a good football team and the advantage they have because of that offense is they're playing with house money on defense," he said. "So they can be really aggressive in scheme, which Coach Spags [defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo] is anyway. Then you've got 55 and 95 [RE Frank Clark and RT Chris Jones], who are difference-makers and game-changing players. So you put that with scheme, understanding you have to score points to win because they're going to score points on offense.
"It's an awesome challenge," Loggains said. "It's one we're all looking forward to, and looking forward to building off of what we started last week in the first half and playing this week for four quarters."
