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After an Offseason Rebuild, the New York Jets Don't Have Much Time to Order Their Roster

The New York Jets, without preseason games, have a lot of roster questions to answer the next week.
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The clock is ticking. After months of virtual online meetings, and a month of practice, the NFL season is approaching quickly. New York Jets head coach Adam Gase met the media Wednesday and is quite aware that the evaluation of the Jets by the fans will come on NFL Sundays.

“I mean it’s close,” Gase said in his virtual press conference. “The majority of guys have been working on Buffalo for a long time, it’s just about introducing it to the players. We’ll see when that happens. We’ll be smart about that this year.”

There hasn’t been a preseason game this training camp. Therefore, the practices and occasional scrimmages have been the only way to see how this team is coming together. For example, the offensive line features four new starters. In a normal preseason, they would three if not four games to come together.

However, due to the restrictions in place this season, this unit hasn’t played together against anyone other than the Jets’ own defense.

“I think this year we’ve at least had the whole training camp where we were kind of playing as a group, where we kind of made some changes there towards the end,” Gase said. “I think (last year) we just didn’t have the chemistry that we needed. I feel like right now, it’s such a different feel because of the group we have. That room is really tight, which is really cool to see. I just think this is a different group of guys.”

Gase believes a big key to that has been the leadership shown by newly acquired center Connor McGovern.

“I feel like he’s done a great job,” Gase mentioned. “You can tell he’s played a lot of football and he has a great way to can control the line there and him and Sam (Darnold) seem to work together, those guys do a great job of communicating, every conversation happening, I’ve really enjoyed watching those guys work as a unit.”

“I think where jelling really well,” McGovern said Tuesday. “The biggest thing is the cohesion part we've been working on that as well. It’s a lot easier now that we're around each other a lot more, doing all that kind of stuff more in person. I think that's been moving along really nicely. “

One decision that has not been finalized but should be soon is the idea of a “quarantine quarterback.” This is a quarterback who stays on the roster and is essentially kept in bubble wrap, playing only if there is a sudden outbreak of COVID-19 amongst the active signal-callers.

“It’s funny because I mean we keep talking about, ‘Alright, what’s the best way to go about this,’ and you don’t want to be lulled to sleep of how many positive (tests) have there been around the league, and you start looking, but you want to be smart because you’re not really sure where this is going to go,” Gase said. “We’re going to start traveling to road games, staying in a hotel, coming back. This is another step that we’re going to have to take, which we haven’t done yet, and there’s some unknown here. So, that’s the tough part, we’ve got to try to figure all this out here in the next couple of days.”