Jet coach won’t show emotion over Rams son
Jets wide receivers coach Shawn Jefferson keeps a stiff upper lip. Just ask his longtime friend and colleague, Adam Gase, or his son, Rams rookie wide receiver Van Jefferson. Or himself.
“Shawn’s wired a little different,” Gase said Friday about the upcoming father-son matchup. “I don’t know how much he’s really going to be paying attention to what they’re going to be doing on offense.”
“My dad is not an emotional kind of person,” Van Jefferson said Thursday. “Of course it’s going to be a good moment because I haven’t seen my pops in a long time.”
The younger Jefferson added that because his father, a longtime NFL player and coach, works weekends during the football season, Shawn has almost never seen Van play in person. “In college, it was very hard for him to see me play — he came to maybe two of my games.”
Van could have been a Jet. He went to the Rams at No. 57 overall in this spring’s draft, just two picks before Gang Green nabbed Denzel Mims. In June, Van told ESPN that he was hoping to play for his father, earnestly saying “I would love to play for you.”
His father’s response to his son making the NFL:
“The thing I’m most happy about is I don’t have to take care of him anymore. He can take care of his own self.”
Gase, who was an assistant with Shawn Jefferson in Detroit and hired him on his staffs in Miami and New York, told a story about how hard a man Shawn is.
“The first time when I met Van, he might have been seven or eight,” said Gase on Friday. “We were in Detroit and his dad was just killing him. He’d have him out on the practice field and doing cone drills. I mean you would think that he was yelling at like a third-year player in the NFL.”
Van Jefferson has 15 catches and a touchdown as the Rams’ No. 4 receiver this season, already surpassing his dad’s production as a rookie with the Chargers in 1991.
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