E-Boland & Gang Green

First and foremost, Happy Father’s Day to all, especially my own, still hacking his way across the golf courses of Cleveland but against whom I still suffer a major mental block when we play. I’m not the only victim, I’m sure, of that kind of phenomena.

Anyway, I saw and met a few fathers yesterday (Saturday) who were watching their sons and daughters - more than 200 overall - participate in the Generation Jets Club Clinic over at Hofstra. A good portion of the Jets rookie class served as instructors at the various stations set up on the Jets training camp field.

Quarterback Erik Ainge, besides showing great comfort dealing with the kids - pretty much all the rookies did - appears to be better as he wasn’t wearing the soft cast we saw him with during the OTAs and minicamp. I say appears to be better because he gave me a “you’ve got to be kidding me” look when I asked him about his recovery from the surgery on his throwing pinky. I was kidding, knowing how Jets players are, let’s say, strongly discouraged from talking about injuries. But I always like to see if guys have a sense of humor. Ainge does.

Ainge did say it was difficult sitting out all of those practices – he went through the drills in terms of footwork, but threw no passes – but that mentally there was plenty to keep him busy.

“There’s so much I can learn from the shoulders up,” Ainge said, referring to the playbook. “It’s like learning a new language.”

Dustin Keller, who also participated in Saturday’s event, said after going through a round of OTAs and the minicamp, the biggest adjustment he had to make related to what Ainge talked about: the amount of information rookies are hit with.

“I reached out to some of my friends in the NFL [before the OTAs] and they let me know that everything’s going to go real fast and that they’re going to throw a whole lot of information at you in a small amount of time,” Keller said. “You have to absorb everything and just be focused with no distractions.”

And that continues even now, the so-called “down period” in the league – the 1 ½ months before training camp – that Keller said isn’t a down period for players, or at least for the rookies.

“It doesn’t seem very down lately,” Keller said with a laugh. “We still go in there [the practice facility], us rookies, and we study together, we study a few hours every single day. We go in there, work out, have some meetings. We’re still working five, six, seven days a week. We’re always doing something in there.”

Though on a day “off” last week, as part of the league’s rookie orientation program, Jets rookies toured the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

“It was awesome,” Ainge said. “I had never been there before. Getting to go into the room with the busts, seeing the Joe Namaths and all those guys…it’s unbelievable to see all those faces and names and it’s kind of like, ‘this is what we’re all trying to do.’”

Keller, who had never been to the HOF either, said he gained an appreciation for the players who were part of pro football's origins, thinking about what it might have been like to take a shot over the middle wearing minimal equipment, including a leather helmet.

“Those guys, they were still ruthless back then so I couldn’t even imagine what that felt like,” Keller said. “It was really cool, just to see the evolution of the sport. To see how it started and how it evolved into what it is today. Those guys didn’t have it as good as we do, in every way.”