Bowles must clean up behavior, if he gets chance
IT WAS supposed to be a harmless “chat” between friends. Kickoff for Saturday’s game pitting the Jets against the Dolphins was three hours away. So when Jets safety Rontez Miles handed defensive lineman Sheldon Richardson his cell phone to Snapchat with a friend Richardson wasn’t expecting it go viral.
“It wasn’t supposed to be out there in general,” Richardson explained on Tuesday of the snap. “It was just conversating with a friend, me and Rontez. That’s all it is.”
What got out there was a video of Richardson calling women “ho’s” laced with other profanity. With the NFL’s sensitivity to domestic violence and how its players treat women, Richardson’s snap cast another dark cloud over the Jets, Richardson’s reliability and the organization’s culture under head coach Todd Bowles.
The Jets spent most of Tuesday balancing between denouncing Richardson’s snap and downplay- ing its level of severity.
“We don’t condone what he did,” Bowles said. “He didn’t go out and rob a bank.”
Still, it couldn’t have come at a worse time for Bowles and the Jets, who are 4-10 heading into their Christmas Eve game at New England. Richardson’ s social media “gaffe,” as Bowles called it, only makes the Jets look even more unprofessional, an image the head coach must clean up if given a third year.
Going back to Geno Smith having his jaw broken in a lockerroom brawl, the Jets can’t keep from making themselves look bad. Richardson, who missed the first four games of the 2015 season after failing a drug test, began this year with a one-game suspension for reckless driving.
In Week 9, Richardson and Mo Wilkerson were benched for the f irst quarter of the Jets’ loss at Miami, reportedly for missing multiple team meetings. There were reported altercations earlier this season between Darrelle Revis and Brandon Marshall, and Marshall and Richardson. Now Richardson, who was named a fifth alternate to the Pro Bowl, is Snapchatting before a game.
It never looks good for a team and a coach when its best players are in the news for the wrong reasons. That has to change even though Bowles doesn’t think it has anything to do with locker-room culture.
“There are going to be f ive things that happen every day as a head coach that you’re not prepared for,” Bowles said. “You deal with them and you move on. You don’t let them linger. You take care of them swiftly and you keep it moving.”
The Jets aren’t moving in the right direction, having lost f ive of their past six games. A priority during the offseason could be shopping Richardson, who is scheduled to make $8 million next year before becoming an unrestricted free agent in 2018. But hi s multiple off- t he- f i el d issues certainly haven’t enhanced his trade value.
Whatever discipline Richardson drew was kept “in-house,” though there remains a possibility he could be benched for a portion of Saturday’s game.
“When you do wrong, you do wrong,” Richardson said. “I’ll take my punishment.”
Actually, Richardson doesn’t think he did anything wrong. He was using social media well ahead of the league-mandated freeze 1 1/2 hours before game time. The language he used in the snap? Well that’s just talk among friends.
“You all send vi deos i nappropriately to y’all friends, too,” Richardson suggested.
You would like to think Richardson would be all about the game on Saturday, but in today’s era of social media, maybe that is unrealistic.
Whether Richardson goes or stays, Bowles needs to demand more professionalism and accountability from his players next season. There needs to be caution flags waving before these wrong decisions are made. Otherwise, it shows a lack of respect for Bowles, a notion Richardson discounts.
“He knows me,” Richardson said. “He knows I didn’t mean no harm by what I was doing.”
There was plenty of harm. It harmed Richardson’s image, and it harmed the team’s image. Improving the Jets in 2017 must start with a more professional culture.