The Sam Alosi story just won't go away for the Jets, it seems. With the Jets under heavy scrutiny after Alosi, the team's strength and conditioning coach who tripped opposing gunner Nolan Carroll, special teams coach Mike Westhoff decided it was about the right time to go pointing fingers.
"If you watch [the Patriots], if you watch their defense when the other opponents' punt team's out there, they're up there pretty close in that line," Westhoff said on ESPN 1000 in Chicago. "So, yeah, it certainly looks like they're trying to do it.
This is all old news by now, going down last week, and it's not particularly interesting news either. The issue in question was not the seemingly-legal wall, but the trip. And the team in question was most certainly the New York Jets. But the real kicker is that it didn't take Mike Westhoff two minutes to contradict himself, adding in:
It's hard to say because to tell you the truth until this occurred I never really looked at anybody's sideline in all my years.
Now, there's two possibilities here if we accept that Westhoff really hasn't been watching sidelines.
- Westhoff decided to make all that up on the spot just because it can't be bad to attack the Patriots.
- He completely missed the point that the trip was what made things a big deal, and decided that the appropriate course of action would be to immediately go digging through Patriots footage hoping to be able to shift some blame.
Honestly, I'm not sure which one of these sounds worse, but for the sake of Westhoff's pocket book, he'd better hope it was the latter, as NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is currently investigating his comments.
While the focus of Goodell's investigation will be the Patriots, and whether or not they do form the wall, New England doesn't stand to lose anything, as the wall itself is perfectly legal. The only question is whether or not Westhoff is making false accusations or not in public, which is in violation of league policy.
It doesn't seem likely that Westhoff will end up being punished, but either way, this can't be what the Jets were looking to do, can it? It prolongs the story, makes them look petty, and seems to show that they still don't understand what the real problem was with what Alosi did. It's very...well, it's very Rex Ryan of them.