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It’s time for another heaping helping of “The Good Stuff” from Jets Confidential publisher Dan Leberfeld . . . check it out . . .
The Cincinnati Bengals had 22 players in attendence at the first day of their offensive “mini-camp” organized by the players that took place on Monday.
They had 25 at defensive workouts held recently.
So that is 47 players between the two units.
And these are the Bengals we are talking about.
The Jets have had nowhere near that kind of attendence.
I have to honest, unless they have some secret meetings we don’t know about, the Jets are one of the least impressive teams in the league when it comes to player workouts during the lockout.
There was much ado about Jets West, the offensive camp, in late May, organized by Mark Sanchez in Southern California, attended by a couple of dozen skill position players.
Then you had a handful of defensive linemen meet for a few days in New Jersey last week.
I don’t count what Bart Scott did in Boca. That was a conditioning camp that he and Vlad Ducasse went to. It really wasn’t a Jets event. There were players from a number of teams there.
We hear Sanchez is going to organize something big this month if the lockout continues.
We shall see, but so far, the Jets player organized events have been underwhelming . . .
As we have mentioned before, there is a beat writer who is setting himself up perfectly to break a ton of stories once the lockout ends.
He’s breaking down a lot of barriers with players on twitter.
It’s a strategy that is going to allow him to strike gold on the beat when this labor mess is revolved.
Check out this exchange with safety Eric Smith the other day on twitter. Smith loves playing chess.
Writer – “You’ve got no chance. LOL.”
I asked another area sportswriter for thoughts on this exchange, and the scribe responded, “I want to throw up.”
Sanchez now loves the writer.
Just watch, this reporter is going to have a banner year breaking news due to his twitter friendships.
Some writers are getting pissed, but the anger could get a little more significant when his strategy pays off very soon . . .
Jenn Sterger did a couple interviews today on some Midwest sportstalk radio stations.
“One, I never met him [Brett Favre],” Sterger said. “Two, that this was just something that was made to be so much more salacious in the press than it actually was. I just wanted everyone to know I really had nothing to do with it.”
When you look at it that way, you have to feel bad for her.
But in all this mess, the one factor that we haven’t focused on enough, was how ill-advised it was for the Jets to hire Sterger to be an in-stadium sideline reporter.
Think about it. You put a very attractive woman, with low cut outfits, standing right near the players on the sideline very home game, you are asking for trouble.
You think Belichick would do something like that.
Football is all about focus. Having a very hot woman in very hot outfits reporting at the home games in close proximity to the players – c’mon.
You say, what about the cheerleaders? They are placed much further way from the players than where Sterger was.
I’m not blaming Sterger, I’m blaming the concept.
And it took one superstar player, who felt he was beyond reproach, to turn this ill-advised Sterger experiment into a PR disaster.
This isn’t a moratorium on female reporters.
It’s about a team putting a woman, who posed in Playboy, who dresses in tight clothes, and putting her next to the bench.
The Jets shouldn’t have gone there.
And we bet if Sterger could have a mulligan on this one, she wouldn’t have taken the job.
Not only didn’t it help her career, it might have ruined it . . .
The photo above is of Jets draft pick Bilal Powell. We did a feature on the runner in the latest issue of JC. What a story! He’s the kind of guy who is hard to root against. He’s overcome so much.