Jets Notes: Clady, Fitzpatrick, Bradford

Unlike their lengthy delay in adding a quarterback, the Jets moved swiftly to acquire Ryan Clady, doing so one day after D’Brickashaw Ferguson announced his intention to retire.

Clady represents a risk, having missed 36 regular-season and playoff games for the Broncos during their 2013 and 2015 Super Bowl seasons, respectively. But Jets GM Mike Maccagnan proclaimed that his new left tackle is “good to go,” per NJ.com’s Darryl Slater.

“I think, from a medical standpoint, he’s cleared to play. I think he was actually cleared earlier for full participation, back in January or December, according to the information I got from the Broncos,” Maccagnan told media, including Slater.”

Jets OTAs begin May 24, which is around a year after Clady tore his ACL on Day 1 of Denver’s OTAs in 2015. Maccagnan said the team will bring the 29-year-old Clady along slowly and that he was encouraged by how well Clady bounced back from the 2013 Lisfranc injury that sidelined him after Week 2. Clady earned his fourth Pro Bowl nod for his work in 2014, when he played all 17 Broncos games, but he wasn’t quite the dependable edge presence he was prior to his first significant injury. Pro Football Focus deemed it well off of Clady’s pace in 2011-12.

Here are some more Jets headlines as the draft nears.

• While Clady represents a probable upgrade from what Ferguson showed in 2015, he’s not close to as reliable health-wise. And per Rich Cimini of ESPN.com, the former 2008 first-round pick is a stopgap solution, along with most of Gang Green’s front as presently constructed. Of the current projected starters — Clady, James Carpenter, Nick Mangold, Brian Winters and Breno Giacomini — only Carpenter looks like a potential long-term option up front, inciting Cimini to argue the Jets need to take an offensive lineman high, perhaps in Round 1, and have to exit the draft with two players who can serve as starters by 2017. The last time the Jets took a blocker that high was 2006, when they selected Ferguson and Mangold.
• The Jets’ relentless back-and-forth offseason with Ryan Fitzpatrick makes the New York Daily News’ Manish Mehta wonder if the Jets are serious about making the playoffs in 2016. The sides remain at an impasse, with Fitzpatrick wanting franchise QB-level dollars (around $16MM AAV) and the Jets having not been connected to an offer in eight-figure-per-year territory. Mehta sees the free agent quarterback’s trip to a Rangers-Penguins playoff game with Mangold and Eric Decker, while Brian Hoyer was at the team’s facility, as evidence the Jets players see Fitzpatrick as their quarterback and that Maccagnan should move faster to re-sign him. “In a perfect world, we’d like to potentially compete for the playoffs,” Maccagnan told media. “I don’t necessarily view that as a benchmark of success or failure. The goal is not to just sort of mortgage the future. We haven’t sort of leveraged everything to try to make one big run.”
• Cimini sees the Jets running out of patience in their Fitzpatrick negotiations, but they won’t budge before the draft, when the team possesses just six picks (two seventh-rounders are among them). The ESPN scribe also does not envision the Jets making a play for Sam Bradford, whom the Eagles owe an $11MM signing bonus even in a trade scenario, placing more emphasis on Gang Green’s willingness to pay up for the soon-to-be-34-year-old Fitzpatrick.