GOIN’ CAMPING
SALEH AND JUDGE GEAR UP TO KICK OFF PRESEASON PREP
MAYBE the click will come early, during one of the sweaty hours of summer. Maybe the click will come during the season, after a few hard-earned lessons, after a tour or two through the humbling wringer of the weekly NFL gauntlet. Maybe the click will come later than that, a season or two from now.
Maybe it will never come. In the NFL, after all, that click — the connection between a coach and a quarterback, their destinies melding and heading toward paradise — is actually quite rare. Sometimes it happens — and vanishes. Sometimes it feels like forever — and winds up fleeting. And sometimes it never happens at all.
This week, the Jets will open training camp with what ought to be the perfectly arranged marriage. There is a new head coach, Robert Saleh. There is a new franchise quarterback, Zach Wilson. It doesn’t matter that Saleh’s background is defense. When a coach and a quarterback click — for real, for keeps — it arrives at a higher plane than mere expertise.
It is about chemistry, a formula whose ingredients are impossible to list but whose presence is impossible to ignore — once it’s there. Saleh and Wilson will either click, or they won’t. And the Jets’ endless quest to find a bookend championship to pair with the one they won 53 seasons ago will either come to a merciful end, or flow, endlessly, into more empty years, more empty seasons, more empty decades.
It starts for real this week: the quest for the click.
“He looks good. You know his arm is live, he gets the ball in and out of his hands pretty quickly. He’s a good decision-maker and all that good stuff. We’re really excited about what he’s shown so far,” Saleh said in May of Wilson. “He’s relentless in terms of his want for knowledge.”
Said Wilson on the April night when he was drafted second overall: “You can go from a losing season one year to a winning seasons the next. You can flip it real quick.”
The clicking game is a curious thing. Sometimes it happens immediately: think Belichick-Brady. Think Lombardi-Starr. Think ReidMahomes. Think Brown-Graham. Think Walsh-Montana.
Sometimes, it happens quite by accident. To listen to Phil Simms and Bill Parcells talk now, they were storming beaches together from Day 1, taking out more bad guys than Popeye Doyle and Cloudy Russo. But it should always be remembered that at the start, Parcells viewed Simms as the second-best quarterback on his own roster. Scott Brunner was No. 1.
That click had to wait a while. It happens. There was a time it seemed Tom Landry would need a court order before he realized he had one of the great quarterbacks ever born, Roger Staubach, wasting away on his bench. Terry Bradshaw is still angry that Chuck Noll kicked the tires on Terry Hanratty and Joe Gilliam before seeing the light.
Sometimes the click needs a kick. Weeb Ewbank coveted Joe Namath, drafted him, built an offense that allowed him to throw for a lot of yards (and lose a lot of games). Then he subtly asked the team to make Joe Willie a captain in 1968, even though his preferred role model for the job was Captain Morgan. But sometime between September and January, it happened. Click. The Jets have spent the years since then understanding better than anyone how fickle and fleeting the click can be. Back in 1986, they started 10-1, and the partnership of Joe Walton and Ken O’Brien seemed headed for the stars (by way of Canton); it wasn’t. For a brief, shining moment, Vinny Testaverde was going to be Simms 2.0 for Parcells. This time the click in question was Vinny’s Achilles tearing to shreds, taking the Jets’ aspirations down with it.
Chad Pennington and Herman Edwards once defeated Peyton Manning and Tony Dungy 41-0 in a playoff game; if you didn’t think that was clicking, you were probably deaf (it actually turned out you were right). The odd, laissez-faire tandem of Rex Ryan and Mark Sanchez was borderline surreal and evaporated more quickly than an August puddle.
The Jets need Saleh and Wilson to be more than that. The Jets need them to click — this week, next month, in November, in 2022, whenever. It just has to happen. It must happen, and it has to be real, and lasting. They begin their journey together this week. Where it leads will not be on their shoulders alone. But if they get where they want, the partnership will be the No. 1 reason why.
And if they don’t … that collaboration will also be the No. 1 reason why.
It starts for real this week. The quest for the click.