The Jets are currently under siege, or no good reason.
They lost their new quarterback four snaps into the 2023 regular season. They still beat the Bills, somehow. They came within a fortuitous bounce of ending a 14-game losing streak to the Patriots.
And yet the sky is falling among Jets fans, who presumably expect the team to still be a Super Bowl contender without the player who made them into one.
On Tuesday, Jets receiver Garrett Wilson appeared on #PFTPM. Among other things, I asked him what he would say to Jets fans who currently are in a tizzy about the team’s offense, without Rodgers.
“I would just tell them to stick with us,” Wilson said. “No one wants this more than us. We’re working every single day to make sure that y’all have a lot to root for on Sundays. You know, with that said . . . our whole season had a big change in it [16] days ago. And then for us that was a big adjustment. We’re still figuring it out offensively, and it’s not just for us to put one dude on the dart board, you know. You got to put that whole offense on the dart board because none of us are playing to our standard right now. We’re going to continue to keep grinding to make sure that’s not the case any more.”
Zach Wilson is the one in the center of the dart board. He’s an easy target, given that he has occupied that circle in the past — and in light of the fact that Jets fans seem to be looking for anyone/anything to blame for the team’s current fortunes.
For now, the offense is hoping to improve by, as Garrett Wilson put it, not starting slowly.
“You see glimpses of it every week,” Wilson said. Every single week, you see what we can be. You know, we put a sequence together for one drive, two drives and we look good, but it’s about bottling that up and making it a consistent thing. That’s what we’re trying to find right now. How we can bottle that up and take it into next week so that we can, you know, start off the game rolling like that?
“We’ve started slow in the past and that’s what we’ve done these last three weeks. We started really slow and we don’t want that to become our identity, but the last three weeks we’ve started slow and that’s what it is. So, if we can try and figure out why we’re playing better at the end of the game or why we score more points at the end of the game and take that into next week, that’s what we’re trying to do, man. And I know Coach [Robert Saleh] is on that and I trust our people upstairs, but as players, you know, just knowing that our mindset at the end of the game is like, ‘Let’s go win the game, let’s go take it back.’ We have to bottle that up and take that earlier into the game as well.”
That approach becomes critical on Sunday night against the Chiefs, because if the Jets started slowly against Patrick Mahomes and company, the game might be over barely after it started.
Christine Lake is a sports fanatic who lives and breathes athletics. With an extensive background in sports journalism, he covers everything from major league championships to grassroots sports events. When she’s not on the field or at the stadium, you’ll find Christine coaching youth sports teams.
