Jets defense has no choice but to respond after Ashton Jeanty comments

After losing to the winless Miami Dolphins last week, the New York Jets have turned into a bit of a punching bag this week.

We had Wink Martindale take aim at the Jets earlier this week on a podcast, talking about the defense, and now their Week 8 opponent is getting in on the fun.

Las Vegas Raiders second-year running back Ashton Jeanty shared why he believes the rushing attack can have a big game against the Jets.

Ashton Jeanty calls out the New York Jets' defense

Jeanty claims that some of the guys on the Jets defense don't really want to tackle. Ironically, the Jets have actually cleaned up their missed tackle problem from a year ago, for the most part. The New York has 29 missed tackles on the season, which puts them ninth best in the NFL.

I'm curious to see who Jeanty means on this defense. The days of Sauce Gardner and Tony Adams arm tackles are long gone. Azareye'h Thomas and Brandon Stephens are both willing tacklers at cornerback.

From the safety room, Minkah Fitzpatrick and Dane Belton are both sure tacklers. Belton has missed just 5.4 percent of his tackles, while Fitzpatrick has missed 2.7 percent of his tackles this season.

The only thing that jumps out to me is the missed tackle that Fitzpatrick had on Caleb Douglas last week.

It was a bad play from Fitzpatrick, no doubt about that, but I'm not sure that tackling is actually the issue here for this Jets defense. They get pushed around on the line of scrimmage. I think that would be a fair critique of this Jets defense, but I'm not sure where Jeanty is going with this one.

The Raiders have struggled mightily to get the ground game going with Jeanty at the helm. They rank 31st in rushing yards and 31st in yards per attempt this season.

Going into this week, Jeanty is averaging just 3.1 yards per attempt, which is the fifth-lowest in the NFL, on 106 attempts. The start to his career has not been what Jeanty or the Raiders were hoping for.

In 24 career games, Jeanty is averaging 3.5 yards per attempt with just three games in which he eclipsed the 100-yard rushing mark. In fact, if you look at the start of his career and that of Trent Richardson, they are nearly identical.

In their first 23 games, Jeanty has 1,885 yards from scrimmage on 445 touches, compared with Richardson's 1,773 on his 443 touches. They each had two runs over 25 yards, and Jeanty had one fewer touchdown, with 13 to Richardson's 14.

Jeanty better hope that this is the week that the Raiders' run game gets going because the calls of him being a bust are only going to grow with the lack of production.

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