For the New York Jets, the NFL Calendar is Working Against Them
The NFL calendar is what it is for the New York Jets. Like most rebuilding teams, the Jets would have benefited from a more traditional preseason to bring together a team that is still very much in the works.
But things being the way they are this offseason, the Jets are forced to make the best of the situation.
“it's just where the calendar is,” Gase said on Tuesday in his virtual press conference. “It's just everything we do, situationally and practice, it's gonna matter. We're not going to be able to spend every day in the exact same situation. So whenever we have these situational type periods, we've got to make sure we understand why we're doing it. What's going on. We got to listen to what's being said, we gotta take it from the meetings to the field.”
The Jets have 19 days until they take the field at the Buffalo Bills. Normally at this time, the Jets would have played two preseason games already. Their third matchup, which is the game where the starters play the most and is the most like the regular season, is usually the best test for judging the two-deep. The Jets were originally scheduled on Friday to host the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Instead, the Jets have under three weeks to work out, have one or two scrimmages, and that’s about it.
“We gotta make it count. Sometimes we get into that whole training camp routine thinking this will come up again while we don't have the preseason game stuff,” Gase said. “Work on a two-minute or work on using our time outs in those situations and all those types of things. So we gotta be on it.”
All of these changes are predicated on the COVID-19 pandemic, and the protocols that the Jets and every other team have been implementing have been intense.
“This whole time has been uncertain, no one really knows about the (COVID-19) virus and how it can spread and all those things,” Jets quarterback Sam Darnold told reporters Tuesday. “I wasn’t sure of how serious it would be and the long-term effects of anything.
The NFL released their latest COVID test results and from August 12 to August 20, the players took 23,260 tests and had zero positive results. Despite a false positive scare over the weekend, the NFL has kept the coronavirus at bay.
“Being able to hear that news and see how serious guys are taking it doesn’t really surprise me because we all wanted to come back and play football, so that part’s awesome,” Darnold said.
Gase spoke about an abundance of meetings throughout the summer when they couldn’t get on the field and now the task at hand is to translate all of those meetings onto the football field.
“We got a lot of work to do, a lot of improvement, situational awareness. [Our] sense of urgency has got to go way up on that,” Gase said. “You gotta understand, when we're doing these periods in practice of how this is gonna affect us in season. We don't have the preseason to work out any kinks. We've got to get it done now. That would be really the number one thing that we have to do is our sense of urgency. If it's high right now, we got to get it up, even more, understanding that the window's closing quick.”
