Todd Bowles is channeling his inner Herb Brooks.
To cut down on his penalties, he’s making his Jets run gassers as punishment.
“Well, practice was over and we said any time we had more than five penalties, we’re going to run gassers,” he said. “There were more than five penalties in practice. We had six, so we ran.”
Bowles is making sure his Jets are ready for the regular season. He knows that pros don’t like to run, so let’s see if this works.
Of course, he’s not just being hard on the players. He’s doing other things to prevent the yellow flags as well.
” You practice hard counts,” he said. “You practice get offs and hard counts and everything like that. If you get off holding ones you just can’t do down the field, you practice technique until you’re blue in the face. Some of them are necessary, (on) some of them, we’re just throwing the flag just because to make them aware. As long as they’re aware and the flags are getting thrown, they’ll get better at it.”
As the Jets get ready for the annual Snoopy Bowl this Saturday against the Giants, he’s also having the scout team wear the Giants numbers to make practice as much like a game situation.
“We just need to know where they are,” he said. “They’ve got good players. They need to know where they are as far as getting lined up. You can see where those guys are.”
He expects most of his starters to be in the game this week. Because the fourth preseason game is more for the backups, expect this to be the last tune-up for opening day.
“Offensively we want to run the ball, we want to be good on third down, we don’t want to turn (the ball) over and we want to convert in the red zone,” the coach said. “Defensively, we want to stop the run, we want to be good on third down, we want to take the ball away and we want to hold them to three in the red zone. If we can do those things right there, we got a chance.”
And how are they doing so far?
“We’ve gotten in a lot better shape,” he said. “I thought the communication was good. Last week, I thought we played fast and I thought we started to gel. (I) didn’t like the penalties, that was obviously of course unnecessary and things we need to work on, but we’re progressing towards the right way. I’ve seen us grow since the start of training camp.”
Now all the Jets have to do is cut down on those darn penalties.
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