If Bill Belichick’s defense made Sam Darnold see ghosts, then it must be spooking Zach Wilson with goblins, witches and zombies.
Wilson will try to exorcise those demons — he is 0-4 with a ghastly 50.6 quarterback rating, two touchdowns and seven interceptions in four career starts against the Patriots — and turn the Jets’ season back in a positive direction Sunday at MetLife Stadium.
Two of his five worst career games by quarterback rating have come in the lopsided rivalry.
“I need to be smart with the ball,” Wilson said. “The last time we played them at home [a 22-17 loss on Oct. 30, 2022], a lot of them were just dumb plays. I need to be efficient and trust what I’m seeing.”
That may be easier said than done against the Patriots, who infamously had Darnold “seeing ghosts” (football lingo for expecting defenders to be in different spots on the field than where they show up in disguised coverages) during a win over the Jets in 2019.
“They have a way of being able to do a lot of the same stuff, but really make it look completely different,” Jets offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett said. “I think that’s the thing that sometimes causes the players to have a little confusion or a couple of questions.
“So they’re always looking at how they can get certain people taken away, and then they change the front — the dynamics — when really in essence they’re just doing the same thing over and over again.”
The Jets did the same thing over and over — punting on seven of 11 possessions — last season in their second matchup against the Patriots with Wilson under center, a 10-3 loss.
He was benched before the next game, so how much did those two poor performances linger?
“I wouldn’t say those specifically — just not playing well for me, in general,” Wilson said. “Each week I maybe lost a little bit of confidence. So, I’m excited for where I’m at right now. I feel like I’m in a good spot, this team’s in a really good spot and we have a lot of belief in each other.”
Wilson was supposed to get a season-long break from the Patriots. But he took over four snaps into Week 1 — after Aaron Rodgers suffered a torn Achilles — and any gains he made contributing to a comeback victory against the Bills seemed to be offset when he threw three fourth-quarter interceptions in a loss to the Cowboys.
Except Jets coaches and teammates don’t see it that way.
“I don’t think you can ignore the elephant in the room at times, but you want to focus on how you can stay in the moment,” passing game coordinator Todd Downing said. “There can be some challenging times and challenging memories, but we have to move on from those as quick as we can. That’s a mentality we’ve been training far before Zach became the starting quarterback.”
Tight end Tyler Conklin made sure to tell Wilson in the locker room after the game that he sees a difference.
“The picks that happened, it was just him trying to make a play in a 30-10 game,” Conklin told The Post. “If you go watch the first two quarters of that game, you see him go through his reads and make some great throws. I don’t want him to dwell on the fact that he was trying to make something out of nothing.”
Even though he is in a totally different offensive scheme, Wilson put himself through the torture of rewatching those last two losses to the Patriots because “every film is worth something.”
The thing he doesn’t need to relive is his postgame comment after the 10-3 loss in Foxborough, Mass., when he sharply answered “no” to a question of whether he let down the defense. Wilson later apologized after realizing the comment ruffled feathers in the locker room.
“Frustration, emotion, things not going well,” a reflective Wilson said in hindsight. “As a quarterback, you have to understand that it’s on you. You have to be able to be the guy who takes it. It’s tough. Going forward, no matter what, I want these guys to know that I always have their back.”
How long on-edge Jets fans will have Wilson’s back Sunday remains to be seen.
“It’s more important to prove to the guys in this locker room that I can lead, I can be efficient, I can get the ball to our playmakers,” Wilson said. “One-hundred percent confidence in myself.”