We’ve officially reached the Nothing-To-See-Here portion of the Jets offseason when juicy rumblings and half-truths get publicly denounced.
Adam Gase took a blowtorch to the latest rumor about a perceived rift between general manager Mike Maccagnan and him.
“Unless I say it, it’s really irrelevant to me,” Gase said Friday during the team’s four-day rookie orientation program. “I don’t know who decides to put that stuff out there. It kind of pisses me off a little bit, because we have discussions on everything. That’s our job. We have to work through so much stuff. That’s what we got to do. That’s all we’ve done since we’ve been here.”
Reports of internal unrest between the top two people on the football totem pole on One Jets Drive surfaced during the draft, with some even suggesting Maccagnan’s imminent ouster. Although the general manager’s job was never in doubt, questions remained about the dynamic between the GM and head coach.
Maccagnan maintained during the draft that he had a solid working relationship with Gase, who didn’t address reporters at the time. The coach suggested Friday that there has always been an open line of communication from the moment he was hired four months ago.
“Since we’ve started,” Gase said, “we just constantly were in communication, whether he’s coming down to my office or I’m going to his office. That’s all we’re trying to do, is just make sure we’re on the same page all the time and making sure that we’re trying to put this thing together as well as we can in a short period of time.”
Although Gase conceded that free agency is a “nightmare scenario” for myriad reasons that have nothing to do with Maccagnan, it’s naive to believe that the two of them saw every player through the same lens.
Truth be told, spirited, passionate discussions are preferred. The best organizations have lively debate. The worst are saddled with Yes men.
Gase, who doesn’t have contractual control of the 53-man roster, admitted that it is indeed healthy to have differences of opinion in the building on the way to finding the best resolution to any problem.
“If it wasn’t, then what are we doing this for?” Gase said. “If everybody just agreed on everything, it’d be boring. You need to have a little excitement every once in a while.”
In the meantime, his disgust over this latest rumor won’t linger.
“Well, the good thing is I don’t read much, because I think a lot of that stuff is crap,” Gase said. “No offense.”
