ADAM CALLS A REVERSE
Day after denying play-calling report, Jet coach changes his story yet again
Adam Gase can’t keep his story straight. On Sunday, he angrily denied an ESPN report that he had taken over play-calling after letting offensive coordinator Dowell Loggains do it for the last month. (Although that depends on your definition of “let”; Gase had reportedly been calling occasional plays in that time.)
“I didn’t take over — we’ve done the same thing for the last four games,” Gase said Sunday. But when pressed by reporters about the obvious fact that Loggains wasn’t sending in plays on Sunday against the Dolphins, Gase had a convoluted and unlikely explanation. “This is not hard. We go through it the drive before, ‘these are the three plays.’ I do the third downs...When we got down, I was trying to do some of the two-minute stuff.”
It’s silly to take Gase seriously at this point, or parse his words as if he’s doing anything but playing out the string for five more games. But he did directly contradict himself when asked about play-calling on Monday. A day after saying that he did the third downs, he said he was evasive because he didn’t want other teams to know who was calling third downs, for example.
“It’s a collaborative effort between Dowell, myself and the offensive staff obviously is involved,” Gase said Monday. “You don’t want teams to know, ‘Hey, is this guy calling runs, calling passes, calling play actions, calling empties, calling dropbacks? Who has third down and the red zone?’”
That’s a reasonable enough position if you have people who specialize in one thing or another making decisions, but Gase already said on Sunday that he was doing third downs and “two-minute stuff.”
That led to the Jets racking up three points against the Dolphins, an improvement over when Gase was strictly calling the plays by himself and the Dolphins shut out the Jets in October. The Jets have the worst offense in the league by nearly simple and advanced measurement.
LEWIS UP IN AIR
With all the attention on the Jets’ quest for 0-16 and Gase’s baffling press conferences, it’s worth noting that Gase has apparently exiled a starting offensive lineman. Starting left guard Alex Lewis, who signed a three-year extension with the Jets in the offseason, didn’t play on Sunday and was replaced by recent waiver claim Pat Elflein.
“Right now, it’s not an injury issue and we’re handling it internally right now,” Gase said.
“We had a conversation. I wouldn’t call it, I don’t know if it’s really a verbal altercation,” Gase said of his interaction with Lewis that led to the benching. “We’ll figure the end of the week at the end of the week.”
ROSTER UPDATES
Linebacker Blake Cashman “could be out a couple weeks,” according to Gase. Otherwise, “we came out of the game pretty clean,” the coach said.
The Jets said that they signed former Monmouth running back and Bergen County native Pete Guerriero to the practice squad. After going undrafted in April, Guerriero had previously spent time on the Jets’ and Panthers’ practice squads this fall.