Rough Start Has the New York Jets Focused on One Day at a Time
This isn’t the start that New York Jets head coach Adam Gase envisioned to start the year. Not record-wise and certainly not in terms of quality of play.
For Gase and the 0-2 Jets, it has been a difficult start to the year. Injuries, as they did last year, have hit this team hard. But there is no denying that even with all the key players missing, that the Jets have underperformed this year.
In both games, the Jets went into halftime down 21-3. Now they limp into Week 3 at the Indianapolis Colts needing a win to change the narrative on a season that was always pegged to be a challenge but never seemed destined to ever be quite this rough.
“It’s about making sure that I got the right mindset going in each day, especially being around the players. You guys saw how I was Sunday, I mean I wasn’t happy,” Gase said on Wednesday in his virtual press conference.
“You’re pissed, there’s a lot of people that put a lot of work into this, not only coaches, but players as well. When you go through Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, you’re preparing, you’re sacrificing everything, you’re putting your life on hold to make sure that you do everything you can to get ready for a game, and then basically we’re not even in the game and that’s frustrating and it makes guys get pissed off and rightfully so.
“But guess what? When you start over, when you get back to Wednesday, you’ve got to find a way to go out to practice, you’ve got to start over, you’ve got to look to go 1-0 for that week, and you’ve got to find a way to improve and then fix the mistakes. That’s the thing I always look at, let’s correct the mistakes we made from the week before.”
For the Jets, this was supposed to be a season of taking a collective step forward. While they had the NFL’s second-toughest schedule, it was always going to be tough for a rebuilding team to challenge for the playoffs or have a winning record.
Even last season’s 7-9 record was likely to be a reach given the schedule as well as the state of the team. That’s just being realistic.
But the Jets have looked bad to start this year and have regressed on both sides of the ball. The offense is flat and the defense, a solid unit in 2019 that had carried the team, is just riddled with errors.
So for the Jets, their only hope to stop the bleeding is to re-group and come up with a new plan. Because what is passing for the Jets right now really doesn’t look or seem like a team with any ambition to build on last year.
“That’s what the NFL is, it’s that information gathering, you’re creating a library, a toolbox for yourself to next time you see that look from another team, because it’s all the same. It’s all the same. It comes in different shapes and sizes, but it’s all the same at the end of the day, use the information you’ve gained,” Gase said.
“That’s why these guys that play 10-12 years end up being really good players, because they use the information they gathered as younger players.”
