Jets' Davante Adams can try to exorcise the franchise's demons, but it'll take more than a post-game speech
Jets wide receiver Davante Adams warms up before an NFL football game against the Pittsburgh Steelers in Pittsburgh, Sunday, Oct. 20, 2024. Credit: AP/Matt Freed
FLORHAM PARK, NJ – It took Davante Adams less than three hours to realize the football hell he’d gotten himself immersed in by joining the Jets. Three hours! One game into his tenure after being traded here from the Raiders and he was so repulsed by what he witnessed in Pittsburgh that he couldn’t even hold his tongue until the next day.
The morose energy he felt from his new teammates throughout that loss to the Steelers on Sunday spurred him to give an impassioned postgame address essentially calling out the Jets – all of them, from players to coaches to management – for being, well, the Jets. For being imprisoned by the same old same old of a franchise that has spent 55 years behind those bars. For succumbing to a losing lifestyle that has been the calling card of this franchise for longer than most of the folks representing it now have been alive.
Aaron Rodgers called it “the realest speech I'd ever heard in a locker room in 20 years.”
Maybe it was. It’s one of the reasons why Adams was brought here, not only to catch touchdown passes but to help change the culture. Rodgers too. Rodgers especially. But there was a disturbing aspect to the oration which underscored just how much of an uphill battle these two and the others added to exorcise decades of demoralizing results from this franchise – the Ghostbusters, if you will – are facing.
As Adams was speaking his mind, telling his new teammates what he has learned it takes to win, he was also looking for their reaction.
“I could see in everybody’s eyes that it was something they had never heard or been exposed to,” Adams said.
Huh?
“That’s part of the problem,” Adams continued, “but also why I can’t get down and upset at them. Here’s what it is. Now you are aware so if we go out next game and we have the same type of issues then it’s a bigger issue… I’m not [ticked] off at the guys, but you have to make them aware that that’s not right.”
The very idea of a winning attitude had become so foreign to this organization, the woeful expectations of disaster so woven into the fabric of the uniforms, that only a guy who wasn’t even on the team five days earlier could recognize it and point it out.
Even when he was playing for the lowly Raiders the past two and half years, Adams said, he never saw the kind of enthusiasm issues he witnessed on Sunday with the Jets. “On the Raiders we had juice,” Adams said. “We had many other issues, but it wasn’t about energy on the field.”
These Jets seemed to have had their spark doused so much that Adams came very close to calling them losers.
“It’s on everybody,” Adams said. “Anytime an organization is in a losing streak, or [is] a losing organization for the ones that are – I’m not going to call any organization I’m a part of a losing organization, but obviously there has been some of that in the past [and] in recent years around here – it’s a little bit of everything. Obviously personnel, but with this team I would just say it’s learning how to win and what it takes. The small things that don’t necessarily have to come from the owner or the general manager. This is something you can solve with the team if you have the right people in here, guys who know how to win. It’s not just about having good players because we have that. You have to have guys who understand and have been on teams that have won sometimes, That’s why I’m here.”
Adams and Rodgers aren’t the players they were when they were perennial All-Pros and championship contenders with the Packers just a few years ago. Age has caught up with them. Rodgers is on this week’s injury report dealing with an ankle, a knee and a hamstring, three nagging physical issues that are unlikely to prevent him from playing on Sunday in New England but may impact how well he performs.
They do bring an intimate knowledge of what winning looks like and what it takes to achieve it, though, which is not something the Jets have an abundance of otherwise. Infusing that into this organization is a process, perhaps a little more ardent of one that Rodgers or Adams realized it would be.
“I think what you do is you try and set up a lot of different things that are part of the structure and the foundation of a winning culture,” Rodgers said. “But until each of those things clicks in, you're fighting against some of the ghosts of years past…. There are just certain cultures that innately have that in it, where it's maybe a little bit easier to access that, but you still have to access it every single year.”
Other Hall of Famers have come in and tried to do what Rodgers and Adams are attempting with the Jets, from Curtis Martin to Ronnie Lott to LaDainian Tomlinson to Alan Faneca. None of them could save this organization from itself.
Are these Jets any closer to getting there than they were the day before they acquired Rodgers last year? Or Adams last week? Or since Haason Reddick, another Super Bowl-winner elsewhere, showed up on Monday?
“I think there's a lot of things in place,” Rodgers said. “It just needs to completely anchor in. And I think there's some things that happened after the game were big, big helpers as far as some of the culture stuff.”
If Adams’ few minutes of heartfelt talking can overcome the more than a half century of momentum this team has had pulling it toward misery, not to mention the recent demoralizing sorrows which many of the current players and coaches have experienced first-hand, it may wind up being the most significant speech by anyone in this franchise since Joe Namath’s prediction for Super Bowl III.
Only this time there is no guarantee the magic will be pulled off.
Until they prove otherwise the Jets are the Jets, no matter what anyone – even Rodgers, even Adams – has to say.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.