Jets defensive end Muhammad Wilkerson signed a long-term deal with the team in July just before the deadline for players with the franchise tag to do so, but he hasn’t followed up that agreement with the kind of season that made him a player the Jets wanted to keep.
Wilkerson had 1.5 sacks in the opener, but has had just two more over the rest of the season while also getting benched for a portion of one game after missing team meetings. Some of Wilkerson’s struggles can be attributed to an ankle injury that developed after his return from surgery to repair a fractured fibula suffered in Week 17 last year and Wilkerson suggested Thursday that those ankle troubles were related to the lack of a solid plan for returning from injury.
“We just didn’t have a plan as far as myself and with the training staff. We didn’t have a game plan going into the season,” Wilkerson said, via the New York Daily News. “There should have been one, but there wasn’t. ... It’s in the past. It’s not like we can go back and change it. ... We figured out a game plan. But it was too late. I guess I thought that it was good to go, and maybe I just needed more time, more rehab.”
Despite not playing up to previous form, Wilkerson played almost every snap through the first six games of the season and then missed a game with the ankle injury. He’s played less over the last eight games and said he expects to be back to full strength for next season, something that would be good news for a Jets team that hasn’t had much of anything go right in 2016.
