VIDEO: Adam Gase Better Win, and He Knows It

Adam Gase had a disastrous, bug-eyed first press conference as Jets head coach. On an appearance on the Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz today, Gase feigned ignorance at the widespread reaction to it, but made a good point in the process: Nobody will care if he’s good or bad at press conferences if the Jets win football games.

“I don’t have Twitter, Instagram,” Gase said. “I don’t read the internet. I don’t watch TV. All that stuff is irrelevant to me. To me, it’s pollution of the brain. I really don’t care. That’s how I operate — I’m here to do one thing, and that’s to help this organization win.”

When Le Batard followed up by asking if anyone in Jets management cared, Gase answered, implausibly, that no one said anything about it. It’s almost impossible to believe that there was all that reaction online, on television, and even on the back page of the NY Post, and his bosses just let it breeze by.

(As Andrew Marchand pointed out a couple days ago, aren’t there potential football advantages with regards to connecting with players by understanding social media and not pretending to completely shut it out? But I digress.)

Does Gase care if he won or lost the press conference? Nope. “I don’t care. Did we win any games because of it? Nobody cares.”

Le Batard hoped aloud that Gase would continue this fight with the tabloids. Gase responded, “I’m not trying to fight anybody — I’m just trying to do everything I can to win games.”

From a presentational perspective, Gase was an embarrassing face of the organization. We’ve gone through this in the past year with Matt Patricia, who got guilted into turning his hat from backwards to forwards by Colin Cowherd because you can’t look like a littered alley and lose football games. (Bill Belichick, on the other hand, could go several steps past the sleeveless hoodie look and be fine.)

You can be the biggest press conference champion in New York history, though, and it wouldn’t matter if you lose more games than you win. Gase may have slightly affected his margin of error — to the extent there wasn’t already, there’s now a bullseye on his back in the biggest sports media market in the world — but he’s got Sam Darnold on a rookie deal and gobs of cap space. Winning or losing is what matters the most, but it’s my opinion that it’s naive to presume all of this happens in a vacuum. Everything blends together.

Anyways, the interview with Le Batard ended on a light note — Le Batard kept peppering Gase about sending him the viral taco video, and Gase evoked his former QB Jay Cutler in response. It’s good that he’s able to laugh at himself, even if it seems unnecessary to maintain a facade that none of the response to his disastrous presser ever really got back to him.