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I have promised the last couple of days to get to this . . .
and now I finally will.
I’m talking about the Gregg Williams-Joe Vitt relationship.
I had a chance to talk to long-time Saints writer Larry Holder, who covered them for New Orleans Times-Picayune and now with the The Athletic-New Orleans.
After the Jets hired Joe Vitt to be a defensive assistant under Gregg Williams, after Vitt had testified against Williams in New Orleans Saints Bountygate scandal, Holder wrote a column for The Athletic.
Holder published part of the testimony that had never been made public before.
“I want to show you here the situations where Gregg Williams is a liar, where Gregg Williams is narcissistic, where Gregg Williams has lost his mind in situations,” Vitt said in 2013.
Vitt didn’t like when the Saints hired Williams in 2009
“The first time we brought Gregg Williams, we said, ‘Jesus Christ, this guy is nuts.’ You know, I mean, talking about himself, talking about his accomplishments, talking about his money, talking about how he should — you know, the guy had a pretty bad track record in being a pretty good defensive coordinator.
“He’s got this insatiable desire to talk about himself,” Vitt continued. “He’s got this insatiable desire to talk about how good he is and his family is. And in the course of all of the bulls—- stories, you’ve got to work your way through it, you’ve got to — you know, you’ve got to try to get the meat and the potatoes of what’s true and not true. But after a while, that just gets to you. It just gets to you.”
And now these guys are back together.
Holder said that when he saw the story on the internet that the Jets had hired Vitt to work with Williams, he thought the story was from a phony twitter account. He could not believe it. So he did some more searching to verify it.
Aside from the tension between these two related to Vitt’s Bountygate testimony, there is also another big problem between these two coaches. Holder told us part of Vitt’s job when he was a defensive assistant in New Orleans under Williams, was to basically monitor Williams and report back to Sean Payton everything he was doing. I don’t want to call it spying, though some people might.
Holder thinks that Gase and Williams might have made a deal where they made a trade-off. If Williams was allowed to hire his son, Blake, for the Jets’ staff, then Gase could have Vitt. ESPN’s Rich Cimini reported that Gase initially didn’t want Blake Williams on his staff, and had to have his arm twisted to make it happen.
“This is going to be wild,” Holder said.
Hey, maybe creative tension is a good thing.
What is the Jets’ perspective on Williams and Vitt being on the same staff?
I have no idea – the aren’t saying anything on or off-the-record. No guidance so far.
February 20, 2019
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