Everyone who wears green and white on gamedays and has moved on to the next game has a few ideas about what ails the Jets this season. Garrett Wilson after the loss at Miami dropped his team to 3-10, suggested that this down season "is like you have a gene."
Aaron Rodgers lightheartedly said he wasn't sure about Wilson's reference to pigskin genetics, or even some opinions having to do with curses that need to be snapped.
But then the quarterback turned serious as he always does when football talk gets down to the nitty-gritty.
"We've lost some leads, we haven't taken some leads late in games," Rodgers said after the Jets' Wednesday practice to prepare for their second road trip to Florida in a week to play the Jaguars in Jacksonville on Sunday. "Whatever the case, this team, this organization is going to figure out how to get over the hump at some point. At the end, it's the players that make it come to life. At some point, people are going to have to figure out what the special sauce is to turn those games that should be wins into wins."
We don't think Rodgers was thinking specifically to Sauce Gardner, who also spoke to reporters and said he was ready to rebound from the hamstring that kept him out against the Dolphins and return to action against the Jaguars. But sauce was definitely on the 41-year-old signal-caller's menu.
"Yeah, it's on the edge of that," he said about his locker room embracing his tasty metaphor. "We just haven't quite figured out how to get that special sauce worked out and mixed up. It's close. There's a lot of great guys in the locker room, a good mix of veterans and young guys. We just haven't quite put it all together."
Rodgers broke out of Food Network mode to provide some familiar spin on what it will take to get the Jets flying high again.
"It takes a conscious effort, an intentional effort to do that," he said. "There's no specific thing, otherwise every team could do it. But I think in general your best players have got to be your best people. And they have to lead the way with their attitude, their practice habits, their leadership, with the way they're talking to the media, with the way they are out in public.
"And then it's a group that has to find that 'jell' and spend time together and enjoy each other enough. ... Guys are so locked in that they don't want to mess up for their buddy next to them because they care about them, because they spend time off the field together."
Did that start to happen on offense at Hard Rock on Sunday? The numbers are familiar now — Rodgers throwing for 300 yards in a game for the first time in three years, the Jets pounding out more than 400 yards of offense for the first time since Game 3, against a Miami defense that is still in or near the NFL's top 10 in many categories. Maybe the offense can get the ball rolling even faster and more efficiently against the Jaguars' 32nd-ranked overall defense and No. 31 net passing defense?
"I think we did some good things," he assessed of the Dolphins encounter. "We still were 4-for-12 on third downs, 2-for-whatever, -4 or -5, in the red zone. Situation football hasn't been great for us. That's why we haven't gotten to 30 [points]. Thirty is kind of the magic number, so we're still trying to get there."
