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On June 12 . . .

Jets owner Woody Johnson tweeted, “I love the way this team is coming together.”

So the owner is feeling good about his team at this point.

There is no doubt something that certainly helped bring his team “together” this spring was having Aaron Rodgers in the house for the entire OTA process.

Remember, that is something Rodgers didn’t do the last few years in Green Bay.

And if you recall, Bally Sports’ Mike Silver wrote, “Not surprisingly, the Packers started the 2022 season slowly, with Rodgers struggling to develop chemistry with his new receivers — and often appearing visibly frustrated by the rookies. It was almost worse that Rodgers seemed to turn it on down the stretch, leading Green Bay to four consecutive victories with its season on the line before losing to the Detroit Lions on the final Sunday of the regular season, a defeat that cost the Packers a playoff berth. Some of Rodgers’ bosses felt that the late run proved their point — that had the quarterback been so invested from the get-go, the season would have proceeded far differently.”

So Rodgers being in Florham Park for all the spring practices, should be a boon to the Jets this year.

The legendary QB worked very hard getting on the same page with his new teammates in the meeting rooms and on the field.

It’s a QB-driven league, and when you have a great QB, and he works this hard with his teammates in the off-season workouts, that is huge.

There is a reason they used to call the off-season workouts passing camps.

There is no tackling, so working on the running game is kind of a waste of time, but you can get a ton of work on the passing game.

And Rodgers’ work with #1 receiver Garrett Wilson was especially important. Those two seem to already have developed terrific chemistry. There was a throw late in OTAs where Rodgers threw to Wilson in tight coverage, kind of throwing him open on the left sideline. It was a great throw and catch and showed how all the hard work these two did together was already paying off. This was during the last week of OTAs.

Defensively, their players got a lot of quality work in, and entering Year 3 in the scheme, so many of the core players should be very comfortable in the system at this point.

One negative for the Jets is the knee injury that safety Chuck Clark suffered late in the OTAs. Clark and Jordan Whitehead worked hard throughout the spring getting on the same page as the team’s likely starting safety tandem, and now all the hard work could go by the wayside. They were working very hard on communicating, You could see that in the open practices.

Now they have to replace Clark, and the possible replacement, Adrian Amos, signed early this week, wasn’t in any of the Jets’ spring practices.

But clearly the most important part of this Jets “coming together” in the spring was Rodgers being there every minute of the spring practices. That is huge for the Jets and should benefit them in camp and during the season.

June 15, 2023

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