A new season, a new head coach, a new starting quarterback (after No. 4 a year ago), a new defensive scheme filled with exciting potential.
And with all that newness, newyorkjets.com is going to take a slightly new approach to covering the games for you, beginning with Friday night's 7 p.m. kickoff of the Jets' preseason opener against the St. Louis Rams at the Meadowlands.
For the previous two seasons, we brought you live, continuously updated game blogs on the Radar, to which you could offer in-game comments. This year, with our ever-adapting technology, we're going to bring you a twist — not to mention a tweet — with our game coverage.
We'll be conducting a live chat during the game through the CoveritLive chat interface. The chat will begin 15 minutes before each kickoff — so at 6:45 p.m. on Friday — and continue until the final gun. Eric Allen and I will host the chat from our prime location right near the 50-yard line in the Meadowlands pressbox. You can ask us questions and offer comments, and EA and I will provide answers and offer insight as the game goes along.
We'll also continue to use **the New York Jets Twitter account**. Rather than mentioning all the highlights that many of you will be seeing for yourselves during the game telecast on WCBS, Channel 2 in New York, we will be tweeting about team and individual records and distinctions and behind-the-scenes observations that will help you follow the Jets as they play each game more closely than ever.
I'll still be filing pregame and postgame Radar entries, with EA, reporter Kyle Richardson and myself working up stories and blogs for the next day, taking us into the next week of the season.
Richardson's Jets-Rams game advance will be up on the site early Friday morning, then I'll check in with the pregame scene-setting Radar from the Meadowlands, and then we'll take our new technology out for a test drive. We hope you'll join us.
Camp Schedule Update
Rex Ryan and staff have made a slight revision to the coming week's practice schedule at SUNY Cortland that nevertheless could be important if you're planning a trip up to see the team off-off-Broadway one last time.
Originally, Thursday, Aug. 20, was set to be the last two-a-days of camp, with pads in the morning and soft shells in the afternoon. Then Friday was going to be a special teams practice in the morning, followed by the afternoon trip back to New Jersey.
The shells and ST practices have been flipped. Now Thursday's schedule is for pads in the morning, special teams in the afternoon. And Friday it will be soft shells in the morning before breaking camp.
This has also been updated on the training camp calendar on newyorkjets.com.
Filling the Westerman Gap
Following up on my Jamaal Westerman lead-in for Tuesday's afternoon practice, I see my good friend Tom Luicci did a piece in today's Star-Ledger about how Rutgers is trying to fill the void left by Westerman's departure after last season. In fact, Luicci gets Rex Ryan's name into the first sentence of his story.
One of the players who'll be trying to move into Westerman's shoes and DE position is Jonathan Freeny, who, despite the spelling, is related to Indianapolis Colts DE Dwight Freeney.
"Jamaal was one of the smartest players on the team," Freeny told Luicci. "Playing behind him every day last year was like a learning experience. He taught me with the way he played and he taught me about the mental part of the game."
