COURTESY OF NEW YORK JETS COMMUNICATIONS DEPARTMENT
Opening Statement… Injury report, out of practice today, Josh Adams with a hamstring. Patrick (Onwuasor), you guys saw him go down yesterday with a knee. There were no ligament tears. We’re kind of still in the evaluation stage as far as figuring out how long he’ll be out, if anything needs to be done. So, it’s kind of early for that, but the good news is, we got out of yesterday without any kind of damage with his ligaments being torn. (Breshad) Perriman, was out with a knee today, we got a good chance for him to be back tomorrow. (Denzel) Mims with the hamstring, (Vyncint) Smith with the core, (Conor) McDermott with the knee, (Pierre) Desir with the hamstring, (John) Franklin-Myers with the groin, (Matthias) Farley with the hamstring, (James) Burgess, low back, Jabari (Zuniga) with the quad, and then Chuma (Edoga) today had a calf, he did not finish practice, but he didn’t go inside, so that’s an encouraging sign. I thought today, I mean, spirited practice to say the least. It seems like tempers were flaring a little bit, but that’s what’s going to happen sometimes when we’re doing a lot of running the football and then the big guys start getting a little irritated with each other and it’s good to see both sides of the ball aren’t backing down. It was great to see Avery (Williamson) and Ryan Griffin and Dan Brown out there, being able to participate in team periods and individual and doing a little more and taking reps off some of the other guys. It was really good to see Avery out there moving around after, not having for a year, so it’ll be good to see him progress through this.
Brian Costello, New York Post: Adam, how do you handle a practice like that today? As a head coach obviously, you don’t want them fighting the whole practice and you know, taking the practice off the rails, but like you said, you kind of like the spirit. Did you address them at the end when you had them all together there? I mean, for me, I always look at it as, you don’t want anybody to get hurt. A lot of times it’s just, they’re kind of scrummed up. You don’t usually see too many punches thrown because it’s pointless, you’re wearing pads and helmets, so you don’t want anybody to break their hand doing something not very smart. I do think, it kind of got to that back half of practice, it was getting a little hot, guys were a little irritated and the thing that I will say is, both sides had to go back, line back up, refocus on what they were trying to do and execute their defense and execute the offensive play. You know that’s the big thing and as long as it doesn’t happen every day, every period, occasionally things go down and we have to be smart with what’s going on, but at the same time it’s just good to see our guys with fire they have.
Connor Hughes, The Athletic: Adam, with you guys going at it again tomorrow, will you dial it back at all, or will it just be full pads, go back at it? We’re going to change up what we’re doing. Can’t get too far ahead now, things change quick. So, we’re going to end up doing a walkthrough tomorrow, we had to move some things around. We’re really close to getting a bunch of guys back, so we feel like changing it up, doing our walkthrough, and then kind of get the rest of our week before our day off, but we feel like we can get a lot of things in there and we can get a lot of guys back out there to practice.
Brian Costello, New York Post: Adam, I think I counted 14 guys out yesterday, I’m not sure how many it was today. How is that affecting you on what you want to do in practice? The reps, the amount of reps, we have to back off there. That’s really the main thing, you kind of got to watch individual. I think really the wide outs and the DBs are the ones that you get a little nervous about because one guy goes down and all of a sudden somebody else’s load goes back up and if you have another one like we have had two guys go down. You know, when you get thrown eight (players at the position), that doesn’t feel like a lot in a training camp and then yesterday like after practice (Breshad) Perriman, he doesn’t practice today, now you are down to seven again. So, that’s where it gets a little dicey, and today we had a heavier run emphasis which was good because at least we didn’t wear those guys down, but they still had a lot of yards.
Rich Cimini, ESPN: A number of teams were affected by the laboratory situation with the COVID tests, which happens to be in New Jersey, so the obvious question, were you guys affected in any way like schedule wise? Yeah, we had to cancel walkthrough last night. We had just started our squad meeting. I was informed of it. I mean everything happened really fast as far as what was being told us and our guys did a great job as far as getting in touch with the league office, following all the right protocols, making sure that we were doing all the right things. So, our guys really, they jumped on it quick as soon as we found out and I had to cancel the walkthrough last night, our guys were trying to understand what was going on. But they handled everything well, they did a good job of, the guys that were told did a good job of, quarantining themselves or if they went home, making sure that they followed the direction of our doctors and our training staff, which was encouraging to see that our guys reacted the right way. And, we didn’t know if we were going to go today until early this morning.
Rich Cimini, ESPN: So other than the walkthrough, was there anything else like virtual meetings affected in any way? No, because I mean we were already in them; we were in virtual meetings. Like I was told and then they had to start informing players and staff, and we shut the building down after we kind of figured out all the things that were going on. I mean our players weren’t here, that kind of worked out for us in that aspect.
Charles McDonald, New York Daily News: How many false positive tests did you guys get back? We had 10 yesterday.
Andy Vasquez, The Record: What was the process like for you guys to be comfortable enough to come back and practice today? What kind of assurances did you get and what was your level of comfort? We had negative tests come back. I trust, especially our medical staff, I trust our doctors to give me the right information, tell me what I need to do as far as my part of the job. I’m trying to be very flexible and understanding that hey, what if I would have lost the practice today. How would I have handled that? What do I have to move? That was what I spent most of my night last night trying to figure out was, okay if we lose tomorrow’s practice what’s our schedule? So, you’re putting together a schedule that might not happen. It’s not a fun way to go through the night, because you’ve got all this stuff already prepared, but you’re just trying to figure out what’s the next steps and you’re almost sitting there going, ’10 people is a lot, and it could affect more.’ So, you’re trying to go through your head of all the options you’ve really got.
Brian Costello, New York Post: How concerned are you that this could happen on a regular season Sunday with false positives? I don’t want to look too far ahead. I would say it’s probably better that happened now than in three weeks. So, I’m realistic in the thought that it’s such an unknown, everything is so day-to-day right now and understanding that things can change very quickly. We’ve got to be able to adjust.
Brian Costello, New York Post: Shifting gears Adam, back to practice, it looked like (Chris) Hogan had his biggest impact since we’ve seen them out there. What have you seen from him in these first few days he’s been out there? Quick study, understands what we’re doing, can kind of translate some of the offenses he’s been in in the past to what we’re doing, some of the technique things are different. He figures it out quick, obviously very smart. He’s a competitor man. He is a just down and dirty – he’s got toughness to him. There’s something about him that I really like. You can tell he’s the kind of guy that just refuses to let anybody put any kind of limitations on him. He’s out there, he walks around like he’s the best guy and he thinks that in his head and he goes out there and he makes plays. It was good to see him get with Sam (Darnold), made a hell of a catch on an in cut. I’ve been impressed. I’ve competed against him enough to know what I’m dealing with here. I’ve been affected in games by him a couple times. I’m glad he’s here, and I like what he brings to that group. Anytime you add a guy that’s been around for a while and the young guys see a guy like that who’s been in the league for a minute and how he works, that’s a plus for us.
Connor Hughes, The Athletic: Adam you mentioned Avery, when he’s fully caught up and 100 percent and ready to go, do you anticipate working him in there with the first team? Because it honestly looks like you guys are getting some pretty good production out of Neville (Hewitt) and Blake (Cashman) right now. We’ll worry about that when that time comes. Just talking with him coming off the field, right now for me I’m watching him. First thing I was thinking of is, ‘Does he feel like he’s good? Is he worried about his knee or is he focused on what’s going on?’ And as far as I could tell, today was a good first step in the aspect of he had bodies around him, he was mixing it up and he looked like he was comfortable. I know he rehabbed extremely hard this offseason – or since this injury occurred – to make sure that when he got put back in this position he’s ready to go. I think he’s got confidence in how he worked, and now it’s just really getting that feel back. In those first few snaps in seven-on-seven, it’s been a while since he’s been out there with receivers and guys moving around and formations, the calls. Today was a great first step for him.
Rich Cimini, ESPN: It’s hard to see from our angle in the end zone, but on Sam’s interception today to (Bradley) McDougald, did he just not seen the middle safety on that one? Could you describe how that play unfolded? We’ve got to clean up something with his footwork, he didn’t help himself there. We did have a little leakage. When I saw him throw it, it was one of those ones where we’re not really sure if he would have got this off if this was a real game. We had some penetration there, but he didn’t help with his footwork. I think that’s what allowed the ball to kind of take off on him a little bit. But that’ll be something we’ll learn from when we go back to studying film.
John Boell, Newsday: Can you talk about Brown and Griffin and what they bring to the tight end situation for you guys? Obviously with those two guys last year being here, and then you talk about Chris (Herndon), and then you talk about (Trevon) Wesco, I mean that’s a deep group. That group has – you’ve got two young guys and you’ve got two guys that have experience and have played a lot of good football in this league and done a lot of different things and contributed on special teams and contributed whether it be kind of the in-line tight end or off the ball. For me, just seeing those guys back out there, that’s a good feeling because those guys were really, really good players for us last year, and it was unfortunate that Ryan got hurt during the season. I felt like he was probably having one of the best seasons of his career before he was injured. He was playing at an extremely high level, he was doing a lot of things that I didn’t even know he was able to do. I love the fact that he didn’t put a ceiling on himself, and he kept – Chris goes down he’s like, “Hey, I can do this,” and it was some things that we had never really seen him do before and didn’t really know he could do. He’s as tough as they come, he’s reliable in the passing game, he finds a way to get open, extreme competitor, he’s as tough as they get. And Dan, outside of being, if not the best special teams player we have, one of the top two, there’s a lot of things at tight end that he’s able to do, especially in the passing game, that’s been his forte for most of his career where he’s contributed the past. But I do think his run blocking has gotten better, his pass protection has gotten better even though that’s really not something we ask him to do a lot.
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