Defensive tackle Quinnen Williams couldn’t hide his frustration throughout his six-plus losing seasons with the Jets. Now, less than three weeks after a blockbuster trade sent him to the Cowboys, he’s having a hard time containing his excitement after playing a key role in two wins in less than a week.
Dallas owner Jerry Jones, who engineered the trade that sent a 2027 first-round pick, 2026 second-round pick, and defensive tackle Mazi Smith to the Jets in exchange for Williams, has been smiling ear-to-ear with every big play Williams has made and the former Jets star went out of his way to praise the Dallas owner after beating the Eagles.
“Man, he’s one of the best owners I’ve had,” Williams said of Jones according to Yahoo! Sports. “So every time I see him, man, we always talk, we always laugh, he always give me...positive reinforcement. It’s amazing having an owner like that.”
Of course, Williams has played for only one other owner since the Jets drafted him No. 3 overall back in 2019: Woody Johnson. And it’s not like you’d have to read very closely between the lines to figure where Johnson ranks in relation to Jones on that list.
When he got traded to the Cowboys earlier this month, Williams went out of the way to praise first-year coach Aaron Glenn and general manager Darren Mougey.
“The relationship that I have with AG … with Darren is still a great relationship,” Williams said to reporters in Dallas when he was introduced after the trade . “The relationship has never broken. I still believe in what AG is doing there is going to be great for those guys, and the leadership that he has is going to be great for those guys. The way that Darren has handled everything is going to be great.”
Williams – f who had a career-high eight QB pressures in Sunday afternoon’s stunning comeback victory over the Eagles, and has more quarterback pressures than any other defensive tackle since joining the Cowboys according to Next Gen Stats – did not say anything about Johnson. Which is telling, especially because he was so quick to praise Jones for his positive reinforcement. When the Jets finally signed Williams to the extension he had been seeking on the eve of training camp in 2023, HBO’s “Hard Knocks” aired video of Johnson and then coach Robert Saleh talking about the four-year, $96 million deal that put Williams right in line with the market value for other defensive tackles in the league.
Saleh praised Williams profusely to Johnson, who responded by telling his coach “that’s a lot of money.”
It’s especially notable that Williams mentioned positive reinforcement given the conversation around Johnson over the last month. In late October he publicly blasted struggling quarterback Justin Fields, quipping that “if we could complete a pass it would look good.”
Glenn and the locker room spent multiple weeks cleaning up that unnecessary mess, which had to be a distraction in the locker room. That episode prompted former Jets quarterback Jordan Travis, to weigh in on his experience with Johnson. And it was unsurprisingly not good, after the Jets decided to pick Travis in the fifth round of the 2024 draft, where he fell because of a devastating lower leg injury in. his final college game at FSU. He never got on the field for the Jets before he was forced to retire earlier this year at 24 years old.
On Travis’ podcast “Travis Takes Two” this month the former Jets quarterback explained how the owner would approach and give him unhelpful feedback.
“I gotta tell you, that guy, no disrespect, but there were things said to me, not obviously to that point because I never got on the field to play, but about my leg,” Travis said. “Like, just slick comments, I don’t know if he was trying to be slick about it. You know how some older people, they just say whatever comes to their mind, and it kind of made me feel a certain type of way.
“‘You ever gonna get healthy?’ And I’m just like, ‘Damn.’ Not like, ‘How you feeling?’ Never that, it was always comments like that. It kind of upset me, but kind of rolled over my head.”
Johnson is no longer the problem of Travis and Williams. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not a problem for Glenn and Mougey to overcome. They just can’t say it out loud like their former players did.
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