Gang Green Nation
It’s early but the signs are encouraging.
When you are evaluating training camp, I find it’s best to not obsess over the day-to-day minutiae of which players are up and which players are down in a given practice. It’s better to keep an eye on themes that pop up over and over.
In the early days of Jets training camp, there has been a lot of talk about how different things feel this year compared with last year.
“It’d be great to stay with the team that drafted me,” Vera-Tucker said. “I feel like everybody feels that way. … I can see this thing turning around, for sure, especially with Glenn, the type of coach he is. He praises physicality, but even more, like, accountability. I think that’s very important for a head coach to do. That’s something I haven’t seen as much of in my career.”
“In the past, there’s been a lot of instability and stuff around just the whole operation. And I feel like this year, everybody’s bought in to this coaching staff. Everybody’s bought in to our GM. Everybody’s bought in to our owner still.
“So it’s like, it just feels a lot better around here coming in every day.”
Now there are a couple of pretty obvious caveats here. Across the league, I’m sure every team is talking up how well they are practicing. The stuff here is also pretty boilerplate for a new coaching staff. Everybody looks great before they play a game.
Still, anybody who has watched the Jets over the last couple of years has seen a chronic lack of discipline and accountability.
A lot of the quotes above are being taken as criticisms of former head coach Robert Saleh. I am sure to a degree Saleh deserves some of the blame. Still, the issues with the Jets over the last few years have been organization-wide. The team’s stated policy in the previous two seasons was that one player was bigger than the rest of the team. It’s tough to build accountability when that’s the case. It’s also tough to build stability when the owners behaves in a completely erratic way. Woody Johnson’s impulsiveness has caused vast amounts of damage. Hall might claim, “Everyone’s bought into the owner still,” but the “everyone” in the locker room voted him the league’s worst owner.
The bottom line is rebuilding the Jets successfully will require the entire organization to function at a high level and avoid the pitfalls of the past. It starts with the new head coach but it doesn’t end with him.
A few positive days don’t mean that much in the grand scheme of things, but you have to start somewhere.
