I've been a bit negligent in my Jets coverage (after all, it's June), but I caught an interesting article in
The Star-Ledger via nj.com and if you didn't catch it, here's the rundown.
Turns out linebacker Bryan Thomas wasn't giving it his all last season. This shouldn't come as a shock to anyone who watched him play, but he was surprisingly candid. Here were his quotes:
"It's not hard to realize my numbers were
off. My practice habits
weren't good last year and those things carried over to
Sunday.
"Maybe I got too complacent. In this league, you
can't do that. You have to stay on your toes all the
time. And now you have competition in here, so you know you
can't do it. You have to go out and work hard every
day. If not, I'll have my (butt) on the sidelines
watching and I don't want that to happen.
"That hurt me, seeing that my numbers were
down. I don't want (people to
say), 'Okay, you did good one year.' I don't
want to be analyzed as that.
"It's a matter of pride. I
can't let my numbers be like that again. We have too
many good players on this defense to let one guy be the weak
link."
In case you forgot, Thomas parlayed his 2006 season (8 1/2 sacks, 77 tackles) into a five-year, $25 million deal. He fell short of those numbers (and by "short of" I mean "miles away from") last season, finishing with 43 tackles and 2 1/2 sacks.
I read Eric Mangini's reaction to BT's comments from
Erik Boland via
jetsblog.com. If you missed them, here they are:
“One of the things we talk about quite a bit, whether it’s after a
practice or after a game, after a season, everybody spend some time and
be honest with themselves. And that’s the only way you’re going to
grow, to sit there and be honest with yourself and how you did. You
know whether you did well or achieved to the best of your ability.
That’s how you’re going to get better. It’s good that everybody does
that … Whenever you have a season like we did, or like we had before
(in 2006 when the Jets went 10-6), a lot of people had to do things
very well, a lot of people had to do things better. There’s a lot of
things I could do better. That’s part of the process. Those are the
types of guys that you want, guys that look at it and say, ‘I could do
better.’”
A lot of honesty is flying around the Jets so far.
Whether that translates into more wins in 2008 remains to be seen.
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