FLORHAM PARK, N.J. — The locker room was mostly empty by the time the media walked in — a fitting image on the last day this Jets team will be together. Most of the players who showed their faces probably won’t be here in 2025.
Left tackle Tyron Smith, one of the team’s key offseason acquisitions who didn’t work out in the end, walked through and spoke, briefly, for the first time in months. Smith might retire, but if he chooses to keep playing, he won’t be a Jet. There was cornerback D.J. Reed alone at his locker, packing up his things, thankful to get another chance to explore free agency. He signed with the Jets in 2022 and became one of the most successful signings in team history. Now, he awaits greener pastures. Aaron Rodgers packed up two footballs he saved from Sunday, one from his 500th touchdown pass and the other from his 503rd, which could be his final one, and exited the building, possibly for the last time. Tight end Tyler Conklin is open to returning but, like Reed, he’ll explore free agency; Conklin acknowledged that nobody really knows what the future holds for this organization besides the man at the top of it.
Owner Woody Johnson declined to speak publicly aside from a one-on-one interview with the New York Post that left more than a few questions unanswered; then, he left for Florida. In Johnson’s stead, lame duck interim head coach Jeff Ulbrich and some players were left to answer for a disastrous season. As the players cleared out their lockers, the Jets’ front office — led by consultant Mike Tannenbaum — went on the offensive, requesting interviews with head coach and general manager candidates from throughout the league. The Jets are moving on to 2025, but the 2024 season still deserves some reflection.
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The Jets went 5-12 and lost five games in which they held a lead in the fourth quarter. Aaron Rodgers played in all 17 games — a stat that, when lined up with the team’s record, would have sounded unfathomable before the season. Rodgers’ performance this season was uneven to say the least, but the team’s problems went beyond the quarterback.
On Sunday night, running back Breece Hall said out loud what many in the building have been saying privately for weeks: “It’s hard for a team to win when your coach (Robert Saleh) and GM’s (Joe Douglas) getting fired halfway through the season.”
Nobody shot that down on Monday.
“Everything’s been a whirlwind,” Conklin said. “Losing a head coach, it was the first time I’ve experienced something like that. That’s not something that’s easy. And the wins didn’t show it but this locker room really does care about each other. A lot of locker rooms would’ve had more division if they went through what we went through, but this locker room really stuck together.”
Added linebacker C.J. Mosley, limited to four games this season due to injury and a possible cap casualty in the offseason: “If you want to look at the record, a lot of people would say that but maybe (Saleh’s firing) was something that had to be done. We don’t know. We don’t make those decisions. Obviously it’s going to have some type of effect because the staff has been with Saleh for a long time. The team, we’ve all grown with Coach Saleh, so him not being there is going to take away some of the foundation we’ve laid out the past few years away … This year was a crazy year for us.”
After Johnson fired Saleh, he said he was looking for a spark. He never found it. The Jets lost 9 of 12 games after Saleh’s firing. They regressed defensively and routinely found ways to lose games they should have won. That’s not to say it would have been appreciably better with Saleh — they didn’t exactly get off to a roaring start and struggled in similar ways in 2023 — but it wouldn’t have been this bad.
Ulbrich’s message to the team on Monday, his last as Jets head coach: Adversity is an opportunity.
“It’s an opportunity to really figure out a lot about yourself,” Ulbrich said. “It also reveals people around you. You know exactly who you’re working with, and there’s power in that. It’s also a gift in the fact that it builds strength and resiliency within you that only adversity can, and ultimately, we won’t win in spite of it, we’re going to win because of it.”
On Monday, there was at least one player to speak who will be here with the next regime and, if he has his way, much longer than that. By his standards cornerback Sauce Gardner had a down season, but he was still good enough to safely be considered one of the best in the NFL at his position. He’s dealt with a lot of turmoil (and losing) during his three years as a Jet, but Gardner remains positive about the future — notable as he’s eligible to sign his first contract extension this offseason (same for wide receiver Garrett Wilson, Hall, and defensive end Jermaine Johnson, the four quadrants of the Jets’ stellar 2022 draft class).
Gardner smiled at the prospect of signing an extension.
“We just really gotta see,” Gardner said. “I take it one day at a time. I’m just going to let my agent handle that. I want to be a part of this for a long time, I want to be the reason, I want to be a part of the change in this organization because if I was to go somewhere else and then it changed, I’d be a hater, for real. I’d probably be the No. 1 hater. That’s just what it is. I want to be a part of this for a long time. I want to be one of the reasons. One person can’t change it but I want to be one of the reasons it changes.”
Ulbrich took Gardner’s message to heart.
“Your best players got to be your best people and they got to be all-in and that is how you create a championship team,” Ulbrich said. “For him to say that is powerful, now you got to get more and more people buying into that same mentality of being all-in, because without it, you don’t have a chance, as we all know.”
Ulbrich was put in a tough spot as the interim head coach, thrown midweek into a job he’d never held before, trying to run a team while still choosing to maintain his role as defensive play-caller, which might have been a mistake. He expects to get an interview for the full-time job, but he’s not expected to be seriously considered for the role. Instead, the Jets will look far and wide to find a coach capable of changing the culture.
The Jets need “somebody that’s a leader, somebody that doesn’t lack confidence,” Gardner said. “When you’re leading a group of men, they’re watching everything that coach does. So just being confident in everything that he does, coming in here ready to win. We can’t come in here with this mindset of: Let’s just win a few games, let’s win more games than last year. We gotta come in here with the mentality and the mindset to win it all, go to the playoffs, go to the Super Bowl. That’s what it’s gotta be. Everything we do to lead up to that has to be right.”
Mosley pointed to “leadership ability.”
“A coach that’s established that’s going to demand a certain way of football,” Mosley said. “You don’t have to like it, you don’t have to be best friends, but you have to respect the way it’s going to work and know and believe that if you believe in that system and do it the right way as much as possible, at some point it’s going to work.”
Wide receiver Davante Adams was the last player to speak on Monday, in a rush to catch a 2:30 flight to Las Vegas, with a plan to buy a cigar and play some golf in the Vegas sun. He doesn’t know if he’ll be back with the Jets — Rodgers’ future will likely dictate his willingness to stick around — but is keenly aware of everything wrong with the Jets organization for someone that only just showed up in October. Less than a week after he arrived, he stood in front of the team after a loss and made a speech calling them out for a lack of energy, a lack of urgency. The speech didn’t wind up spurring anything.
Adams still made his mark, both on the stat sheet — 67 catches, 854 yards and seven touchdowns in 11 games — and in the locker room. He came to the Jets thinking it might be the start of something special, a reunion with Rodgers that would, hopefully, last beyond 2024. Instead, it all fell apart. His goal was to win, and to help build a winning culture in an organization that has missed the playoffs 14 years running. He didn’t realize how tall of a task that would actually be.
“I learned a lesson,” Adams said. “I would’ve much rather passed that lesson and won the games. But where we are right now and where we have been, we lost some games but it turned me into a better leader having to go through some adversity that I didn’t experience earlier in my career in Green Bay. I just kind of took winning for granted. Losing makes winning a lot more sweet.”
So how can the Jets build a winning culture?
“There’s a lot of pieces that go into it,” Adams said. “Every floor of this building is important to changing this culture. You can win games but to be able to establish a winning culture is a different thing. You’ve got to buy in and you need a coach that’s able to come in here and win over the players and be somebody that holds everybody accountable.”
There’s that word again: Accountability. They say it a lot around here. But what does it mean? That’s on the next coach to figure out.
(Photo: Luke Hales / Getty Images)
