Five Thoughts on Sauce Gardner’s Contract Extension With the New York Jets

The Jets go two for two extending their top ten picks in the 2022 NFL Draft.

1. Everything I said yesterday about Garrett Wilson’s contract extension applies to Sauce Gardner’s deal.

I have said it before. I will say it again. Drafting and developing talent are the most critical steps of building a consistently good NFL team. But drafting and developing are not helpful unless you retain that talent. Otherwise you’re just training good players for the other 31 teams. This week the Jets have ensured that their two best Draft picks in recent memory will spend their prime years in New York. Keeping these guys was a huge step towards putting this franchise on the path back to respectability.

2. Sauce Gardner is the most important player for the Jets on defense.

The Jets are moving from Robert Saleh and Jeff Ulbrich’s defensive scheme to Aaron Glenn’s. The new system is going to highlight Gardner’s talents in a way the old one did not. With Glenn in town, we can expect plenty of blitzing and man coverage.

There were moments where Saleh and Ulbrich would get aggressive, but their preference was usually to rush four and play with seven men in coverage. That type of approach makes the defensive linemen the most important players on a defense since they won’t have any help getting to the quarterback.

In Glenn’s system, blitzers will assist in the pass rush. That leaves less help for coverage players in the back of the defense, which means you need players who can hold up one on one. Gardner’s game is suited well for this, and he has the talent to hold up against the very best receivers in the league. Keeping him around was a no brainer.

3. This record setting contract is a bargain in some ways.

It’s surprising to say that a record setting contract could be a bargain, but I think you could very well make the case that the Gardner extension is.

There is a simple question I like to ask when I assess a player’s value. How valuable are the players he is supposed to neutralize?

Sauce Gardner is supposed to neutralize big play wide receivers. I think we know those guys are plenty valuable. The paychecks of the top receivers in the league would certainly suggest as much.

Ja’Marr Chase has an annual salary of over $40 million. Justin Jefferson’s salary is $35 million. CeeDee Lamb is at $34 million. DK Metcalf is just under $33 million. AJ Brown makes $32 million. And as you probably know, Garrett Wilson just got $32.5 million.

Sauce Gardner just became the highest paid cornerback in the league with a $30.1 million salary.

These game changing receivers have salaries in excess of $30 million, while the guy who can erase them makes less. I don’t want to make this sound like a franchise changing level of savings, but this does sound like a bargain to me.

If anything, top flight cornerbacks should be making more than elite receivers. The NFL has arguably never been loaded with more talent at the wide receiver position, while you can count the number of cornerbacks who can hold up with the best on one hand. Scarcity should raise the price, but it hasn’t here.

4. This gives me confidence the leadership in the Jets organization is improving on all levels.

i think it’s fair to say that there has been a real leadership vacuum in the Jets organization for some time on a number of levels.

One of the most recurring themes from Jets management has been their unwillingness to be proactive in extending high end players. Frequently this has led to the departure of these stars. It began just months after Woody Johnson bought the team when Keyshawn Johnson was traded to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. It has continued over the last two and a half decades as general managers and coaches have changed. Even when the Jets do extend their best players, there tends to be more drama than was necessary. The Jets also pay a higher price for their hesitation.

I’m not ready to put Aaron Glenn and Darren Mougey into Canton before the Jets have played a game under their leadership. I will, however, say it is refreshing to finally see leadership in the organization that is proactive and willing to invest in talent.

I could also see the leadership improvement extending to the locker room.

I have expressed on many occasions my frustration with the way the Jets operated in 2023 and 2024. In 2022, the Jets felt like they had some direction as an organization for the first time in a decade. They had accumulated a quality young core, and that was reflected in the results on the field. There has only been one stretch over the last decade and a half where the Jets improved their record in two consecutive seasons. That was 2021 and 2022, and it was the result of quality drafting.

The Jets saw the improvement that came from investing in homegrown talent, and it seems like the lesson they learned was to reverse course and start building their team the exact opposite way. Over the next two years, we saw the Jets bring in aging star after aging star. These players had big reputations but also big egos. More importantly, they were on the downside of their respective careers. The Jets made plenty of accommodations for these players, particularly Aaron Rodgers.

Ultimately the result was failure. If you have followed Aaron Glenn’s comments to the press this offseason, you have heard plenty of boiler plate coach speak (as you would listening to any other NFL head coach during the offseason). But within that coach speak, you hear things that resonate. He has discussed the need to build a team rather than a collection of players. He also has discussed how essential it is to have guys who come to work and buy into the program.

It might be a cliche, but the Jets the last two years were a collection of players. They brought in a bunch of big names who didn’t buy into the team concept instead of building on a promising young core.

This week suggests we are seeing a course correction. The Jets are now building around their recent Draft picks. And when you invest in people like this, they buy into the program and want to take on leadership roles.

5. Give some love to Joe Douglas.

When Douglas was hired by the Jets in 2019 as general manager, the buzz could not have been louder. He was hyped as the NFL’s next great executive. As we know, it didn’t quite work out that way. Douglas proved to be nowhere near as good as advertised.

What we can say is he did make a number of excellent decisions during his tenure that will help the franchise for years to come. Drafting Gardner and Wilson are at the top of that list.

Douglas might not have been good enough to make the Jets a Super Bowl team or even a winning team during his tenure. He certainly wasn’t nimble enough to work around the dysfunction coming from ownership. But he is the first Jets general manager since Bill Parcells to leave the team better than he found it.