I watched the first half of this game last night. Some observations.
Ty Johnson looks more decisive than Carter does to me and he showed more burst and acceleration than Carter did. Carter seemed indecisive to me at times looking for holes to develop that didn't. Johnson finishes his runs stronger than Carter does, not that either had good yards after contact that I saw, but I think defenders felt Johnson a bit more on contact than they did Carter who was more trying to slip away than just putting his head down and trying to win that way.
Michael Carter has better footwork and change of direction ability than Johnson does. This is something I really like about Carter is his shiftyness. He didnt really make anyone miss with this though but he is trying to do that, Johnson is not.
Ty Johnson reminds me more of Tevin Coleman as far as his play style.
Despite this difference Johnson failed to convert on two short yardage opportunities he had. What I am talking about is more style than substance.
I thought the blocking was pretty good early on but the Giants defense seemed to adjust and do a better job of containing them in the 2nd quarter.
Carter didn't impress me as much in this game as he did in cut ups of his play in college. What I saw was I think a bit tentative and indecisive, like he is adjusting to the speed of the pro game.
Ilov80s asked about success rates of RB by order they were selected not round. Workdog did a VBD study of this quite a few years back now
here that is. Its kind of odd but the 5th RB selected has been slightly more productive than the 4th RB selected but its still somewhat close for RB 4-6 and then a big drop off for the 7th RB selected and after that. This seems counter intuitive and I think the result is somewhat random with some small sample size of successful RB bringing these numbers up a bit for the 5th RB. If anything what I would take away from this is that you want RB who were top 6 of their class and to be more leery of RB selected after that.
I do think Carter has been overdrafted a bit based on how high he went in
rookie polls pick 12 but as already mentioned I think this is more because of the 2021 draft class being a bit weak for fantasy skill players besides the QBs.
The way the two RB were used did seem to be RBBC. Johnson would be in for 2 or 3 touches then they bring in Carter. I saw this pattern repeat itself so it seems to be by design. The Jets did have the ball a lot longer than the Giants so we had the opportunity to see this useage develop. Johnson did seem to be the preferred RB on short yardage attempts but as I mentioned he was not successful in converting those.
I need to see more of course but I came away from this being a little bit disappointed with Carter compared to my impression of his ability watching him at the college level. I am less confident in him being a better RB than Coleman now than I was before watching this game.