Robert Saleh and the Jets have to trim their roster to 53 players by 4:00 p.m. Tuesday. That means a lot of difficult conversations with players whose NFL dreams will be shattered in the process.
The gravity of those talks and what it means for the men on the other side of the business isn’t lost on Saleh in his first season as a head coach.
“This is by far the worst part of football,” he said Monday. “For some of them, the dream of playing professional football is over. For some, they’re still going to be able to continue on.”
Saleh has been a part of many roster cutdown days before as a coordinator and position coach in the NFL. But this is the first time he’s playing a major role in the decisions of who to cut and who to keep as a head coach. It’s also the first time he talk to every player who gets a pink slip, opposed to just the defensive cuts he dealt with in San Francisco.
“You never want to be the one to deliver bad news and you just hurt for them because you know how much effort and how much work they put into it,” he said. “It’s not easy, it’ll never be easy.”
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