Bates the perfect teacher for Sam
He’s bouncing around practice in team-issued gear, blabbing into a walkie-talkie, posing as a pass rusher and giddy like a kid let out for recess.
Jeremy Bates has found perspective, peace and clarity again after he wondered whether perspective, peace and clarity would elude him forever.
He is back doing what he was born to do, helping and teaching guys how to play the coolest game in the world. The new Jets offensive coordinator is the exact right person to mold the most important person in the building these days. He’s the ideal teacher for Sam Darnold.
Bates, the son of a coach, is all ball all the time. He’s a football dork enlisted with the gargantuan responsibility of developing Darnold in this critical phase of the Jets rebuilding process.
“He’s done an outstanding job,” Todd Bowles said. “I think he has done a great job adjusting and doing things on the fly and putting things together and how he sees things and making us offset with run and pass.”
Bates’ brilliance was evident in his return to football after a four-year hiatus. Team insiders repeatedly told me last season that Bates, hired to be OC John Morton’s quarterbacks coach, was the smartest offensive mind in the building.
Bates’ meteoric rise from an assistant on Jon Gruden’s staff in Tampa to a 32-year-old play caller for Mike Shanahan in Denver was something to behold. He was young, hungry and driven. Perhaps too driven. He didn’t suffer fools, which didn’t always sit well with others.
His football acumen, however, was never in question.
“Jeremy was a guy that was ahead of his time,” Shanahan told me earlier this year. “He’s an extremely bright guy. That’s one of the reasons why he called plays. I knew he could handle it.”
He could, but he tried to be Superman.
Now, he’s learned a valuable lesson: Trust can be a powerful tool.
So, Bates has leaned on offensive assistants Mick Lombardi, Karl Dorrell, Rick Dennison, Jimmie Johnson and others to help steer the ship in the right direction.
“Sometimes as a young coach you want to do it all,” Bates said. “Not that you don’t trust everyone on the staff, but I had the mindset as a young coach, if I’m going to fail, it’s going to be me.”
Bates has done so many strategically smart things to help the signal caller transition to the next level. He’s spread the field and employed window dressing (motions, etc.) in preseason games to give Darnold a clearer pre-snap picture to diagnosis defenses. He’s offered wisdom after the rookie’s mistakes. He’s been a coach, friend, teacher and mentor.
“It’s awesome that he is able to sit with us and that he’s had experience with quarterbacks,” Darnold said in the spring. “He’s able to understand, when I am looking at the defense. Even just on tape, if he sees my helmet looking one way or the other, he understands what I am thinking just because he’s coached quarterbacks for so long and because he was one.”