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As reporters, we often complain when players say nothing worthwhile when we interview them.
So it would be hypocritical to criticize a player for being candid and providing a quote with meat on the bones.
Jets WR Garrett Wilson made news on Tuesday when he said the Jets should make the playoffs this season.
“I think it should happen, I’ll say that,” Wilson said. “It’s our job to go play ball and do it, but that’s how I feel about it.”
There is nothing wrong with positive thinking, but the issue with the quote could be that it’s not exactly what the coach has been preaching.
The coach has been preaching process thinking.
I have written a lot about process thinking in this space over the years. It’s a big Nick Saban thing. It emphasizes daily preparation and hard work over long-term results. In other words, work your butt off in the next drill, film session, conditioning session, and so forth, and the results will take care of themselves.
“Don’t think about winning the SEC Championship,” Saban said while coaching at Alabama, “Don’t think about the national championship. Think about what you needed to do in this drill, on this play, in this moment. That’s the process: Let’s think about what we can do today, the task at hand.”
Aaron Glenn was asked on Tuesday in his press conference, before Wilson’s comments, “When you talk to your guys, winning is the goal every year; do you mention playoffs to them? Do you make that an expectation?”
“I think that takes care of itself if you win, Glenn said. “So, I don’t think you need to talk about that. If you just win games, the playoffs are a byproduct of doing that. The players are well aware of that, so let’s just take every game, let’s talk about how do we win this game and focus in on that, right? And once we do that, then we go to the next game, and once we do that, we go to the next game. And at the end, and this thing is done, our record is going to tell us exactly what we need it to be.”
So some might argue that the head coach and star player aren’t exactly on the same page.
Once again, the point of this post isn’t to criticize Wilson. He’s so fed up with losing after not doing that much in college at Ohio State.
And after interviewing him, with other reporters, in scrums after many losses with the Jets, you could see it was kind of denting his soul.
It would have surprised me if he had wanted a change of scenery, like Quinnen Williams, Sauce Gardner or Jermaine Johnson – a fresh start somewhere else.
True, he signed a four-year, $130 million contract extension on July 17, 2025, but let’s not forget that Gardner signed a monster deal around the same time and then was traded in-season last year.
I’ve covered Wilson since he entered the building, and I’ve been to a lot of these painful post-game pressers where he just doesn’t know what to say anymore. He got a reprieve over the second half of last season when he was on IR with a knee injury. Can you imagine how painful it would have been for him to talk during that five-game stretch to end the season, rife with blowout losses?
So, look, we all understand Wilson’s frustration, and perhaps he’s trying to manifest his team to the playoffs, thinking like Walt Disney, who once famously said, “If you can dream it, you can do it.”
But in team sports, it’s so important for everyone to be on the same page with their messaging. If the coach is preaching process thinking, ideally, that is what players should as well.
However, I have no complaints about what Wilson said.
From a reporter’s standpoint, it was awesome.
Not the usual cliché stuff you get from players and coaches.
September 9, 2026
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