As we all know, Number Four is on our team, and he may well be in Miami by now (he’s in town to play the Dolphins, you dumbass). All of New York is pulling for its favorite son to lead the Jets to victory over hated rival Chad Pennington and the Miami Dolphins.

I suspect somebody, somewhere will write something about the quarterback matchup in that game, so I thought I’d look instead at the Jets’ hopes of stopping the run–and establishing the run game themselves–on Sunday, and in the other 15 games they’ll be playing this season.

On the defensive side of the ball, the biggest move the Jets made this offseason was trading for mammoth defensive lineman Kris Jenkins. The team immediately declared Jenkins the starting nose tackle, even though Jenkins had played only single-gap defense since his rookie season. Because of the positional adjustment, and Jenkins’s history of injury issues, it’s hard to predict what he’ll do in his first year as a Jet. Still, if we look just at last year’s numbers, how much of an improvement can we expect Jenkins to be over the guy he’s replacing, former first-round draft choice Dewayne Robertson? The answer is, quite a lot.

Last year, Robertson was involved in tackles on 49 running plays and 67% of those were considered “stops.” A stop, for these purposes, is defined as preventing the offense from getting 45 percent of their needed yards on first down, 60 percent on second down, or 100 percent on third or fourth down. The guys at Pro Football Prospectus came up with these numbers, and they seem to me adequate benchmarks for measuring the success or failure of a given play. So compared to Robertson, how did Jenkins do last season? Well, Jenkins was involved in 33 running plays and recorded a stop a whopping 88% of the time (all figures courtesy Pro Football Prospectus 2008). Meanwhile, on Robertson’s running plays, the opposition gained an average of 2.7 yards. Jenkins? A mere 1.5 yards. Looking at these numbers, it seems that opposing offenses simply didn’t run at Jenkins, knowing it was all but hopeless. Last year, the Jets allowed 4.2 yards/attempt, good for 20th in the league. It is reasonable to think that simply swapping Robertson for Jenkins will improve that number by a quarter of a yard.

The Jets’ other major change in the front seven–signing Calvin Pace to replace Victor Hobson at outside linebacker–should also help to improve on the porous run defense of a year ago. Hobson recorded a stop on only 49% of the running plays he was involved in, the lowest number among Jets’ regulars. Pace’s run stop rate was 65%. When Hobson tackled a ball carrier, the opponents gained an average of 3.9 yards. With Pace, 2.7 yards.

Some might expect that a full season of David Harris at inside linebacker would also bode well for the Jets in stopping the run, but the numbers don’t necessarily bear that out. Harris made 90 plays in the run game last year, but only 52% of them resulted in stops. Our forgotten former captain Jonathan Vilma actually beat him in this statistic with a 58% stop rate. In addition, rushers tackled by Harris averaged a whopping 4.5 yards/carry. It was only 3.8 for Vilma. There was, however, a vast difference in the sheer number of plays made by the two inside linebackers last season. Harris was in on 124 plays and recorded 67 stops. Vilma made only 46 plays and got 25 stops in comparable playing time. I’m not entirely sure what to make of these numbers, but my guess is that Harris got to so many rushers, even after they’d broken through into the second level, that he made many tackles that resulted in long gains for the offense. This doesn’t necessarily mean he was less effective than Vilma. If, for example, Vilma made two tackles on plays that got short gains, but whiffed on two guys getting into the second level, the yards/attempt on his tackles would be low. If Harris made the same two plays, but then also caught up to two players deep in the second level, his yards/attempt number would suffer. But it would be hard to argue that Harris was less valuable based of this.

My last hypothetical shows that these statistics require much interpretation and can’t just be used in a vacuum, especially with the linebackers. I repeat my caveat from above: there is no magic formula that can tell us exactly how much improvement we should expect from plugging new players into a new defense. But a sane person can look at the numbers and say, “I think the Jets will allow 3.8 yards/attempt or less this year.” In fact, I consider myself a sane person, and I’m going to go ahead and make that prediction. It’s bold of me, I know. Only nine teams allowed 3.8 yards or less last year. In addition, the Jets haven’t been at that elite level of run stoppage since 2004. Still, with Jenkins in the middle, I think these guys are going to get it done.

After years of allowing opposing offenses to run through them like gasoline through an SUV, the Jets may finally have the front seven in place to shut down a ground game. Of course, the Jets might also be starting three players in the secondary who have two years’ experience or less, but let’s just take things one step at a time, eh?

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