On Thursday, the New York Jets held their final training camp practice of 2024. Afterward, multiple players spoke to the media, and they consistently echoed the same sentiment.
“It ain’t been this hard since mat drills my freshman year of college, waking up at 5:30 a.m.,” said Quincy Williams.
“It’s probably the heaviest training camp I might have had in my career, so far,” said Tyler Conklin.
A few days earlier, 40-year-old Aaron Rodgers agreed, saying, “I would say the camp is much harder this year, and maybe the hardest in the last seven or eight years of my career. I knew that I had a little insight coming into camp that it’s what Robert [Saleh] wanted to do. So I think it’s been good for us.” Rodgers added that New York’s starters had gotten around 300 more reps than they did in last year’s camp.
If you’re head coach Robert Saleh, you have to be feeling tremendous about how things played out.
The Jets are a veteran team with many players facing significant injury questions. Choosing to give this team a “hard” training camp – rather than play it excessively safe – was a bold move by Saleh. If he publicly announced this intention prior to the start of camp, he likely would have been chastised by fans and media. Traumatized by the events of 2023, Jets fans probably would have preferred to see Saleh put all of his key players in bubble wrap instead of having them run a single 7-on-7 rep.
But Saleh took the opposite approach, and it turned out to be a smart gamble in the end. Despite pushing his players harder than they have ever been pushed before, New York made it through camp without any significant injuries. Now that the team has reached the end of August in good health, the harder work ultimately did nothing but make them more battle-tested and prepared for the regular season.
The Jets have struggled mightily with injuries over the past few years. It reached a point where the team’s injury woes could not be explained solely by bad luck. There had to be something that could be done to improve the team’s fortunes.
Perhaps this is the change New York has been looking for.
It is possible that the Jets had set a standard of taking training camp too lightly, making the players’ bodies unprepared for what was to come in the regular season. Most of the Jets’ severe injuries in recent years – namely Carl Lawson (Aug. 2021), Mekhi Becton (Sep. 2021 and Aug. 2022), Breece Hall (Oct. 2022), Aaron Rodgers (Sep. 2023), and Alijah Vera-Tucker (Oct. 2022 and Oct. 2023) – happened from August-October. Players were usually getting hurt early in the season (or before), which points to a possible lack of preparedness.
Playing it safe would have been the easy way out for a franchise that is scared to death of the impact that one freak injury could have. Saleh spat in the face of that fear by challenging his players to go even harder.
Sure, this approach may have hypothetically put them at greater risk of injury in the present, but in the long run, it would send them into September feeling more accustomed to the routine of regular season football than most other teams. And since the Jets escaped scot-free anyway, Saleh’s bet paid off. He netted the long-term benefits without any of the short-term costs.
And, who knows? Maybe the idea of Saleh’s strategy carrying short-term risk is far-fetched. It’s possible that going harder actually decreased the player’s risk of injury in camp.
Contrary to his aggressive camp approach, Saleh announced on Thursday that he has decided to rest his starters for Saturday’s preseason finale. That makes it three consecutive games with no reps for the starters.
Some might argue that Saleh’s decision to rest his starters throughout the entire preseason contradicts his aggressive approach in training camp. I disagree.
Consider the workload that the starters have already gone through in joint practices. Not only did the Jets compete in three joint practices this season (compared to only two last season), but the third one was similar to a normal game in length. According to Saleh, the Jets and Giants planned to go “about 75 plays” in their Wednesday practice. That is substantially more work than the starters would get across all three preseason games combined.
Sure, there’s less contact in a joint practice than in a preseason game, but joint practices are far more valuable mentally. Preseason play-calling is absurdly vanilla, offering nothing for players to learn from an X’s & O’s perspective. Teams are a little more creative in joint practices, allowing players to gain experience that is more transferable to a real game than what they would see in the preseason.
Plus, resting his starters for the entire preseason is Saleh’s reward for their hard work on the practice field. With three joint practices and nearly a month of intense training camp practices, forcing his starters to play even one rep in the preseason would be overkill. Eliminating the risk of a preseason injury washes out the (hypothetical) increased risk of injury that came with Saleh’s intensified camp approach.
Saleh has been the subject of constant criticism during his tenure as the Jets’ head coach (including from yours truly). He deserves credit where it’s due. His modified plan for the team’s 2024 training camp was a smart move. By going with an intensified approach in camp, the players’ bodies are more prepared for a 17-game grind than they were in any of Saleh’s first three seasons.
This could be the answer to their injury woes that the Jets have been looking for.
