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This is the time of year players are essentially thrown in the garbage like Chauncey Washington. T-Rich was, but then bad PR brought him back . . .
First off, a big reason the team doesn’t want to play a lot of veteran minimum salaries like T-Rich.
“Their PSL and ticket situation is bad,” said an executive with another team who asked to go nameless.
And let’s not forget luxury box sales aren’t great.
Along with a bad economy hurting ad and sponsor sales.
There you have it.
It’s just the reality of what is going on in Florham Park, and in so many other NFL cities.
Things are bad out there.
So Jets (and many other teams) would rather have a lot of backups making the rookie or first and second-year minimum to save a few hundred thousand dollars here or there.
A lot of people are wondering how the Jets could possibly go with the wildly inconsistent John Connor as T-Rich’s replacement.
After all, they are Super Bowl contender, and obviously they don’t want to get their high-priced quarterback beat-up due to missed assignments by a fullback learning on the job.
Well, it might not be Connor taking most of T-Rich’s reps.
We shouldn’t make that assumption.
Based on what I saw this summer, a guy who is going to play a lot of fullback is tight end Mathew Mulligan. He lined up in the backfield quite a bit over the last few weeks.
He’s much further along in the playbook, and less apt to make the kind of rookie errors that Connor is given to right now.
Mulligan is a powerful man, a star in the weight room. He’s a very stout blocker.
And another reason the Jets probably prefer to give the second fullback spot to Mulligan, aside from money (he makes about half of what T-Rich was going to make) is that he plays on all the special teams. Remember, T-Rich doesn’t help much on specials, so perhaps the Jets didn’t feel they were getting a lot of bang for their buck out of the veteran fullback.
Don’t get me wrong. Connor will be on the field at fullback, but I bet Mulligan is on the field just as much or more.
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