Adam Gase has plan to make Le’Veon Bell more effective

Le’Veon Bell’s first season with the New York Jets was enormously disappointing, and head coach Adam Gase is working hard to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Gase has two key aspects of his plan to make Bell more effective in 2020, and wants to lighten the load on his featured back.

“I do think we have some guys that can help maybe lessen the load on [Bell] to where it’s not all on him,” Gase said, via Rich Cimini of ESPN. “Hopefully, we can get some of the younger backs to where we can make a good one-two punch to where we can really excel instead of feeling like it’s just all on him all the time.”

Gase is also banking on improved personnel resulting in fewer loaded boxes for Bell to run into, which was a significant problem in 2019.

“If you have the vertical threats like I think we’re going to have with the wide receivers now, hey, maybe we’ll start seeing two-high zone instead of them just focusing on one guy in the receiving corps,” Gase said. “You’ve got [tight end] Chris Herndon back. You’ve got [tight end] Ryan Griffin. You’ve got some guys who can do some different things there and stretch the field vertically. That was something Chris was really good at. Now, all of a sudden, Le’Veon is seeing lighter boxes, which he didn’t see a lot last year. We saw loaded boxes for the most part. We didn’t do a good enough job winning in the passing game to open some of that stuff up.”

The Jets didn’t have a good offensive line last year, which has to improve. It sounds like there was also some behind-the-scenes grumbling about Bell’s conditioning. Ultimately, Gase knows that Bell being better is good for Sam Darnold and the entire offense, and it has to be a major priority going forward.