Jets get rewarded: After being kept at trade deadline, Breece Hall carries load in win over Browns
Breece Hall of the Jets runs a reception for a fourth-quarter touchdown against the Cleveland Browns at MetLife Stadium on Sunday. Credit: Jim McIsaac
A week in which the trades the Jets made shook the franchise was capped by a win behind the player they refused to deal away.
Boy, are the Jets glad Breece Hall is still around.
“One hundred percent,” guard John Simpson said of being thrilled by the team’s decision to keep the running back despite plenty of speculation and opportunities to do otherwise. “One thousand percent.”
From late in the third quarter through the final meaningful snap of the game with just under a minute left, the Jets ran 20 offensive plays. Hall touched the ball on 16 of them. He ran for 54 of his 83 yards in that span and also caught a screen pass that he turned into a 42-yard touchdown. It broke a tie early in the fourth quarter and wound up accounting for the winning points in a 27-20 victory over the Browns at MetLife Stadium.
“He’s our workhorse,” coach Aaron Glenn said. “That’s something we have talked about quite a bit. When we needed him, he came through.”
He was just about the only one who did. On a sloppy, rainy day in which the rest of the Jets’ offense struggled to function properly, in which there were no passes that gained more than 4 yards other than that screen to Hall, in which six of the first seven possessions were three-and-outs or worse and the few fans who showed up spent most of the afternoon booing, Hall put the team on his back.
He had 21 carries in the game. Well, 22 if you count him carrying the entire offense.
“When times are tough, he will get the ball,” Glenn said. “This is a win-by-any-means-necessary league. At that point, our way of winning was to make sure we feed him in a number of ways . . . Man, we have to get him the ball as much as possible.”
Glenn told Hall essentially the same thing during the game. “He knows I’m pretty quiet. I’m not a guy who complains. I just kind of go with the flow of what is going on,” Hall said. “He came to me and said, ‘I’m going to feed you. You are going to be the biggest factor of us winning this game, so go be you.’ We ran the ball a lot in the second half, effectively, and we were able to get the win.”
Glenn even made a rare appearance in the postgame locker room period open to the media. He emerged to speak with one player, put his hand on Hall’s shoulder, whispered a few words to him, then left.
Hall said those remarks will stay between him and his coach. Wanna bet it was something close to what Glenn told reporters last week after the trade deadline when Hall was still a Jet?
“I think I’ve said this a million times over and over that Breece was not a guy I wanted to get rid of,” Glenn had said on Wednesday.
On Sunday, he undoubtedly felt the same way.
Hall, of course, downplayed the drama of the past few days, of which there was plenty swirling around him and about him. His mercurial postings on social media and his non-answer answers with the media regarding his future with the Jets in the aftermath of the swaps of All-Pros Sauce Gardner and Quinnen Williams for mostly future draft picks only added to the uneasiness throughout the organization.
But when he was asked about having the game he had just produced in light of the week the Jets had just had, he said: “What do you mean the week we had?”
Later, Hall insisted: “I wouldn’t say it was a roller-coaster week. I’ve known the position I’ve been in since like May, so for me, it’s kind of like, [expletive] it . . . I’m here to show up on Sundays, Mondays, Thursdays, so the other stuff is for you all to gossip about and for everybody else on the outside to worry about. For me, it’s all about football.”
The other stuff? The tea leaves he seems to enjoy sprinkling around? It just makes Hall as elusive and hard to pin down off the field as on it.
He is a hard guy to get a read on for the reporters who cover the team.
“Us, too,” Simpson said of Hall’s elusive personality.
On the field, though, there is nothing capricious or illegible about him.
“He saved my butt a few times today,” Simpson said. “Breece is one of those guys that you have to give him the ball, you have to put the ball in his hands, and he’s gonna make something shake. I feel like he is one of the most determined guys I have seen play in a while. I played with some good running backs, Josh Jacobs, a few other guys, but I think he is that caliber running back. It’s cool to play with a guy like that.”
This performance will not end the conjecture around Hall.
He’s still going to be a free agent at the end of this season. There still are questions about how long he’ll play for the Jets. And while their strategy of being a one-man, practically QB-less offense worked against a Browns team that made numerous mistakes — including two unforgivable penalties in the final two minutes when they had a chance to get the ball back with a chance to tie or win — it’s hard to imagine it being a sustainable model for success.
But Hall addressed the team after Glenn handed him one of the game balls. “We’re all we got,” Hall told his teammates. “We’re all we need.”
On Sunday, that was the only truth the Jets needed to worry about.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
