Joe Namath feels bad about his relationship with Jets

Joe Namath may be the most famous New York Jets player of all time, but that little fact hasn’t been holding him back from being one of the team’s toughest critics.

Over the past couple of months, he’s appeared on various radio shows and hasn’t held back at all when it comes to criticizing his former team–but that doesn’t mean he feels good about it. In an interview following the screening of HBO and NFL’s Namath, a film based on the man himself, he said that he regrets the current relationship he has with the Jets.

“I feel awful about it, I feel awful about my relationship with the Jets right now. I don’t want them upset with Joe, but damn it, I have to say what I see, what I think, what I feel,” Namath said of owner Woody Johnson, General Manager Mike Tannenbaum and Coach Rex Ryan (via ESPN). “I think they can do some things better, no doubt.”

Namath wasn’t about to jump on the Mark Sanchez hate bandwagon, though. The problem with the Jets, Namath says, isn’t with the rookie quarterback. Instead, Namath believes that the Jets’ poor performance can be attributed to the team’s leadership.

“Mark made some mistakes this year, no doubt, but he can play,” Namath said. “It’s only his third year, man. You see guys out there who have played longer than that, making those same mistakes. He’s going to learn from his mistakes and he needs the help around him.

“He presses at times, he wants to do things because he’s expected to, and I think he got a little tired of being, ‘The kid this, the kid that.’ Hey, he’s made it through three seasons now, and he’s not a kid. He’s a man out there. He’s a man and, if they get the people around him, he’s going to be fine.”

Namath also addressed criticisms of Sanchez’s leadership abilities, opining that it isn’t a quarterback’s responsibility to boss around his linemen.

“I didn’t push any kind of leadership,” Namath said. “Lead by example as a football player, as the quarterback: to know the plan frontwards, backwards; be able to answer; know my guys; convince them I was ready and would give it my best. But no taking over a locker room. You have to have someone with the strength of the guy over in Baltimore — maybe Ray Lewis — you’ve got to be a beast to do that kind of thing, man.”

via ESPN