Geno Smith played an ugly game on Sunday against the San Diego Chargers but Smith’s struggles on the West Coast actually began on Saturday.
The Jets had a team meeting which on Saturday, which Geno and a couple of Jets teammates missed.
As the Daily News first reported following the game, Smith missed team meetings on Saturday, according to a source familiar with the situation, angering team members. Early Monday morning, a Jets spokesman confirmed that Smith did indeed miss team meetings on Saturday, calling it an “honest mistake.” According to the spokesman, the quarterback “got the times confused” and arrived 5-10 minutes after the meetings ended.
The reason for the confusion? Time zones. Smith went to a movie during the team meeting because he mistakenly thought that the team had scheduled its meetings according to Pacific time. Rex Ryan keeps all of his scheduling on Eastern time, regardless of where the Jets travel.
According to Rich Cimini of ESPNNewYork.com, Smith got confused by the whole Eastern/Pacific time-zone thing.
Smith and a few teammates opted to go to a movie, and they were “messed up” by the three-hour difference between New York and San Diego.
Per Cimini, coach Rex Ryan always keeps the team on Eastern time when playing on the West Coast. But Smith’s cell phone automatically adjusted to its location, as most cell phones do.
That seems… needlessly complicated. According to the ESPN report, this happens to at least one Jets player on every West Coast trip, which makes it less a fault of the players than of scheduling policy. If Ryan really wants to keep his players accustomed to Eastern time while playing on the opposite side of the country, maybe he could include West Coast time as well to avoid these sort of mistakes.
