The wildcat that so many roared so much about is going out with a whimper.
Jets coach Rex Ryan has essentially shelved the wildcat portion of the offense, with Tim Tebow’s rib injury leaving him unable to run it.
“It’s not something we practice doing a lot of the other stuff,” Tebow said, via Jane McManus of ESPNNewYork. “We just try to run the offense.”
The fact it never became part of the offense, despite all the talk about it, is almost a letdown. A healthy Tebow could have added something to the run game, but the Jets haven’t seemed all that inclined to use him.
Ryan has taken Tebow out of his old special teams role, and said Tebow would still be the team’s backup quarterback (rather than Greg McElroy) but that if Tebow played he’d be running the regular offense.
“I don’t really see him in that [punt team] role,” Ryan said. “As far as the wildcat obviously [not] with the ribs the way they are. Hopefully once we get the OK with those ribs we can expand that but that’s probably not necessarily going to be a big factor in our game plan.”
Tebow has handled this whole mess with grace, but didn’t seem to agree with the notion he couldn’t be a conventional quarterback.
“Everyone thinks the whole time in Denver we had this read triple option,” Tebow said. “I mean, it started with no read plays, a few weeks later it was one, maybe two, maybe three, then you have a few option plays — but that was five, 10 percent of our game max. So we did a lot of other plays from under center, shotgun — just normal football plays. So it wasn’t just the read-option.
“I can do other things other things than just read a defensive end.”
Perhaps.
But it seems clear now that as long as Ryan’s coaching the Jets and Mark Sanchez is still standing, that’s a chance he’s going to have to get somewhere else.