Three on D: Stephens, McDonald, Phillips

After each game, we typically highlight three defensive and three offensive players and look in detail at their performance. We'll wrap up today with the defense:

On the Feast of Stephens

The enduring memory of Brandon Stephens' afternoon will probably be him trailing Romeo Doubs to the end zone on Drake Maye's long touchdown pass. Coming one week after Stephens was beaten for another deep ball touchdown, this is not a good look.

He hasn't generally been blamed for the Doubs touchdown, though. David Bailey reportedly got his assignment wrong when he dropped into coverage, leaving the Jets with a 3-on-5 pass rush that gave Maye a long time to survey the field and wait for someone to get away from their man. Additionally, Minkah Fitzpatrick vacated deep center field to jump an intermediate route to AJ Brown down the middle. Pro Football Focus even "credited" the touchdown to Fitzpatrick's coverage rather than Stephens.

It's clear that it was a zone coverage as Stephens picked up Doubs but gave him plenty of room to the inside as if he was expecting safety help to be there. However, he doesn't completely get off the hook because he had plenty of time to see that the safety wasn't there and to get closer to Doubs and gear down into a sprint much sooner. Unfortunately, recovery speed is not one of his strengths.

Aside from that play, Stephens didn't give up much at all. He came up and stopped Brown on a short pass and may have been at fault on the 10-yard gadget play that Pop Douglas caught coming across the field. Again this was a zone coverage and Douglas came from the opposite side into the area Stephens was originally manning. However, he had dropped deep to address the threat of a deep ball off the flea-flicker so it would be unduly harsh to blame him for that play.

Stephens, who only had two tackles, did make one big play when he broke up a fourth down pass with New England threatening to turn the game into a blowout after halftime.

This was a nice play but you have to wonder if Brown, who struggled to catch anything cleanly all day, would have held onto that had he not been so rusty.

Anyway, Stephens continues to exceed expectations even if he's been on a wrong end of a couple of plays these past few weeks. We'll see if that continues.

The Will to Succeed

The current narrative on Will McDonald's role and situation doesn't actually reflect reality. The widespread belief is that he's viewed as a liability against the run and therefore is seeing less action overall with most of it as a designated pass rusher.

As logical as that seems, they instead seem to be limiting his pass rush opportunities more than ever. And whenever he enters the game, offenses appear to be on high alert because he's either getting doubled or the ball is out immediately.

Take Sunday for example. McDonald was in on 23 snaps but only 10 of them were pass rush attempts - the lowest number he's had since he was a rookie.

That's not an anomaly either. As things stand, he has rushed the passer on less than 50 percent of his snaps. Obviously in previous years, even with people suggesting he should play less run snaps, he still rushed the passer on the majority of his reps.

What's driving this? With Joseph Ossai out, you might have thought they would use McDonald more to stretch the top end of the rotation further. Instead, David Bailey played virtually the whole game, and wasn't particularly effective at generating pressure either, for the same reasons.

It may be that the Jets ideally hope to be leading late in games, at which stage they can ramp up McDonald's usage and he can be effective down the stretch while fresh, much like he did in the Titans and Browns wins.

However, they aren't exactly a team that can guarantee a lead, so they need to get more out of him when games are tight, or they are trailing and trying to get back into it.

Of course, he has been on the injury report, so perhaps he's not 100 percent, but right now his usage is confounding - especially after they committed to him for next year during the offseason.

In the game, McDonald carried out his assignments in coverage and against the run with no real negatives or impact.

Other than a special teams tackle, his biggest impact came on this pass rush where he was obviously held but got no call.

On 2nd-and-1, this could have been a sack, a hold, a turnover via a fumbled lateral, a Patriots recovery of a fumbled lateral for a loss of yardage or an intentional grounding penalty. Somehow, all five possibilities almost happened but did not, leaving them to run the ball twice and pick up the fourth down conversion. The drive ended in a field goal.

We'll see if McDonald can get going over the next couple of weeks.

Harrison Filip

Harrison Phillips had an interesting game which got off to a good start, as he hustled to make this stop on the second play of the game.

That was it for Phillips, who didn't register another tackle, or any other official stats, all day.

He definitely put a tough shift in, though, working hard to try and hold his ground in the trenches with mixed results. Sometimes - usually, in fact - he will initially hold his ground well, even when double-teamed. However, there were a few examples of him getting moved about and he ended up on the ground quite a bit, including on a play where the Patriots were called for holding anyway but Phillips got absolutely pancaked.

Here's an example of him battling to hold his ground and seemingly helping to bottle up the run, only for the runner to somehow squirm free and out to the second level.

We know Phillips doesn't offer much as a pass rusher, but the effort is there in this area too. This play sums him up as he battles to get to Maye but is too late to prevent him completing a pass.

Phillips is viewed as a steadying veteran presence and the team is lucky to have him with David Onyemata on injured reserve but he's unlikely to give you much in the way of statistical production or impact plays ever. For the year, he has 14 tackles, three quarterback hits and a fumble recovery but no tackles for loss.

Out of contract at the end of the year, it's possible Phillips could be enticed back for a rotational role on a lower salary. However, it's equally possible they could seek to get a late round pick for him from some defensive tackle-needy team around the deadline if the team falls out of contention by then.

Previously: Three on O: Membou, Myers, Taylor