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When Le’Veon Bell held out for a season over his contract, Mike Tomlin said something very profound.
“We want volunteers, not hostages.”
He has used this saying on other occasions when a player seemed disgruntled.
It might be time for the Jets to start thinking that way with Haason Reddick, who continues his contract holdout, refusing to honor the contract the Jets inherited from the Philadelphia Eagles in a March trade.
Reddick, dismayed about his contract, has yet to practice with the team, and missed the team’s opener, which hurt the Jets edge-rush in their 32-19 loss to San Francisco.
The Jets got little pressure off the edge, and had no sacks in the pocket where an edge rusher beat a tackle. Two were by defensive backs (Sauce Gardner and Tony Adams) tracking down players running behind the line.
The Jets don’t have an edge rusher on Reddick’s level. Reddick had 50.5 sacks over the previous four seasons.
And this has nothing to do with trading John Franklin-Myers who isn’t a great edge-rusher, but more of a power player. People can keep writing about how trading Franklin-Myers to Denver was a mistake, but how often did he ever take the edge on a tackle rushing the passer? That wasn’t his game.
So Reddick was dearly missed in San Francisco.
By not honoring his contract, which was scheduled to pay him $14.25 million this year, he really hurt the Jets at Levi’s Stadium, and they should not forget that.
There is such a vitriolic situation that it’s hard to think that if he just came back to play under his current deal, or a tweaked contact, with a little more money, he would be ready to sing Kumbaya with people in the Jets’ organization.
So while Douglas said he wouldn’t trade him, maybe it’s time to consider that.
After all that has gone down, why would you want this guy on your team?
The vibe could be terrible.
And if he did come back, wouldn’t he be a hostage? . . .
In order for the Jets to fix their run defense, they need to make some lineup changes, but that is probably a long shot, because Robert Saleh is extremely loyal, sometimes, perhaps, to a fault.
And there is always talk about how guys much improve technique, or whatever, and that will make it better.
That doesn’t always work.
I’m not going to name names, but there are certain players, who did in the opener what they were doing last year.
And they had a whole off-season and training camp to work on technique and fundamentals to improve their contributions to the Jets’ poor run defense last year.
So when they come out in the opener and do the same things, do you think extra tutorials this week will fix them?
In the case of some of these players, they just struggle to get off blocks, due to being undersized (I can think of two players who fall into this category), or in another case, a player is not athletic enough for the Jets scheme, which calls for athletic, fast player in the front seven, because they ask them to run sideline-to-sideline. He’s more of a 3-4 player.
So lineup changes are needed, but I don’t expect them.
Saleh is a big-hearted man, a kind soul, a wonderful family man, who perhaps doesn’t want to hurt certain guys by benching them on defense.
But sometimes if you get too close, you can’t see the forest for the trees.
However, if you don’t hold guys accountable for playing poorly, and continue to roll with them, that can hurt your football culture.
Now, even if the Jets roll with the same guys, their run defense should improve this week because they are facing a much weaker opponent, but this run defense needs major repairs.
And this isn’t nothing new. What you saw in the opener was going on last year, even though Mensa candidates told us all off-season the Jets had an elite defense last year.
September 12, 2024
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