Quinnen Williams is by no means a veteran with two-plus years of NFL experience under his belt, but he’s been with the Jets long enough to endure more negativity than some players experience in their entire career.
Williams has won just nine games with New York since Mike Maccagnan selected him third overall in the 2019 NFL draft. The Alabama product broke out in a big way last season and has been one of the team’s few bright spots since his rookie year. Nonetheless, the Jets are off to another dreadful 0-3 start and the outside criticism is starting to come before the calendar turns to October.
Williams is having none of it.
“I still don’t want to hear that [expletive],” Williams said Monday, per SNY. “People that have negative stuff to say about Zach [Wilson] and the team, we’re not listening to them.
“We want to keep getting better every single day. If you listen to the negative things, you can eventually believe in those negative things. You can eventually go into a tank about those negative things. For me, for the team, for Zach, we’re not listening to the negative [expletive] that’s being said.”
The Jets have not been competitive for most of their first three games, scoring a combined 20 points against the Panthers, Patriots and Broncos — three teams with good defenses. New York has scored just six points the last two weeks and Wilson has not played his best football over that span, throwing four interceptions against New England and taking sack after sack against Denver.
Jets fans might not want to hear it, but Williams has a point. It’s easy for a team to hang its collective head if it starts listening to all of the outside noise that comes with a winless first month of the season. New York is trying to avoid the negativity in an effort to fight off the potential tailspin that would likely come along with giving in to the bad instead of looking forward to the good that could come.
The Jets still have time to turn their season around, even if their prospects of doing so don’t look too good right now. At the very least, they can show signs of improvement and reason for hope ahead of 2022. Williams is a big part of that on and off the field as a leader in the trenches and in the locker room.
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