Lost in the recent brouhaha between OBJ and Gregg Williams in advance of Monday night’s Jets-Browns game is the fractured relationship between one of Cleveland’s other receivers and one of the Jets’ other coaches.
Jarvis Landry and Adam Gase have been debating whether Gase’s threat while coach of the Dolphins to exile players to Northeast Ohio was real or made in jest.
“That was in a team meeting and it was a joke at the time to one of the other players,” Gase told reporters on Friday. “It was supposed to be a joke, and I think he took it a little serious.”
“It wasn’t no one-time joke,” Landry said Friday, via Mary Kay Cabot of Cleveland.com. “But again, I’m happy to be here, I’m excited about the opportunity, the challenge, since day one.”
So was Gase serious?
“What do you think?” Landry, who was shipped from Miami to Cleveland in early 2018, said. “Where am I? Listen, honestly, man, regardless of what tactics were used or what was said, all those things are in the past. I’ve decided to move on. I have no slight toward Adam, I believe he’s a great coach, he calls plays well and I’m excited about the opportunity, the matchup. Who would have thought, right? We’ll see.”
Common sense suggests that Gase didn’t unload Landry on the Browns. Instead, Gase and the Dolphins, after applying the franchise tag to Landry, found the best deal they could and did it. Really, who in his right mind would do a worse deal simply to hurt a player? It’s one thing for a team like the Steelers to not trade Antonio Brown to the Patriots (oops); it’s quite another to trade a player to one specific team for spite, when more can be gotten from the player elsewhere.
Meanwhile, Gase can now joke about trading Jets players to Miami. And Landry would surely laugh at that one.