Creating opportunities to win a game against the Raiders wasn’t the Jets’ problem on Sunday night.
The problem was capitalizing on them. A Josh Jacobs fumble with under six minutes to play left the Jets with a golden chance to drive for a go-ahead touchdown and they moved the ball into the red zone before Raiders linebacker Robert Spillane picked off a Zach Wilson pass to help seal a 16-12 Raiders win.
It was the only turnover of the night for Wilson, but he stepped out of bounds short of the end zone on what appeared to be a touchdown earlier in the game and a holding penalty on tight end C.J. Uzomah wiped out a Breece Hall touchdown on the next play. There were a slew of other flags that stunted the team’s momentum, dropped passes at the wrong times and other mistakes that conspired to sabotage the Jets’ chances of getting a win in Las Vegas.
“There’s so much frustration, I don’t know how to put it any other way,” Wilson said, via the team’s website. “The hard thing is I know everyone is battling. We just have to find a way to be better out there.”
Melissa Stark of NBC Sports said on Sunday night that Aaron Rodgers is targeting a mid-December return to action after tearing his Achilles in Week One. That would be remarkable, but any return will also be moot if the Jets continue to inflict the kinds of wounds on themselves as they have in two straight losses that have the team 4-5 with little reason to believe better performances are around the corner.