Jamal Adams believes Adam Gase is the wrong man to lead the New York Jets, as conveyed in an interview with the New York Daily News.
Just days before the start of training camp, Jamal Adams has taken another major shot at the New York Jets.
In an exclusive interview with Manish Mehta of the New York Daily News, Adams hit on a variety of topics, including head coach Adam Gase, whom he believes is the wrong man to lead the team.
“I don’t feel like he’s the right leader for this organization to reach the Promised Land,” Adams said. “As a leader, what really bothers me is that he doesn’t have a relationship with everybody in the building.
“At the end of the day, he doesn’t address the team,” Adams added. “If there’s a problem in the locker room, he lets another coach address the team. If we’re playing sh—y and we’re losing, he doesn’t address the entire team as a group at halftime. He’ll walk out of the locker room and let another coach handle it.”
Adams’ words contrast with Gase’s on the subject. The head coach claimed his relationship with his best player “has been good since the time I’ve gotten here” on a conference call with media last month.
Interestingly, Adams, 24, had been quiet over the last couple of weeks. Many thought he was taking a tactical approach as camp neared, looking to reimmerse himself into the team’s culture. That idea is dead in the water.
In addition to criticizing Gase, Adams also stated that his personal happiness is the most important thing.
“It’s definitely mixed feelings,” Adams told the News in his first comments amid the contract stalemate. “But at the end of the day, my happiness is more important. I know my worth. I’m going to stand on my beliefs. I’m going to stand on who I am as a person. And I’m not ever going to change who I am for somebody who’s judging me. Either you accept me for who I am and you work with me and support me or you don’t. It’s okay if you don’t.”
It stems from a January/February 2020 time period in which Adams claims the Jets told him a first contract extension offer was shortly coming. Once Joe Douglas told Adams he would initiate a first extension draft with management/ownership, with no actual extension to follow a few weeks later, that’s when the first offseason trouble began to surface, according to Mehta.
The miscommunication from there continued, according to the story.
“If they would have just simply said, ‘You know what, Jamal — we’re not going to look to pay you this year, we want to keep adding players — I would have respected that more,” Adams said. “I would say, ‘You know what? I respect it. As a man, I get it. I understand it’s a business.’ But for them to tell me that they’re going to pay me and then not send over a proposal after they said that’s what they were going to, that’s where we go wrong. And then for you to ignore me, that’s why I have a problem.”
Players will be reporting to training camp in just four short days. Adams says he’ll report for his teammates, but at this point, it’d be unfair to conjure up a strong opinion without first hearing from the organization.
