Jaxon Smith-Njigba seems to throw former Seahawks OC Shane Waldron under the bus
By Lee Vowell
To be fair, before I get too far into this, we should probably remember that Seattle Seahawks wide receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba is a rookie still. He does not have the years of experience built up to know how to give us overly bland answers without blinking. Let us hope he never really does.
JSN has a lot of charisma. That comes through in his body language and the words he uses. There is also a youthful charm about him. But that was part of his issue on Wednesday when he appeared to slam the work of former Seattle offensive coordinator Shane Waldron. The issue was not what JSN said (after a moment), but how he initially reacted to being asked what he thought of Waldron.
The question from a Chicago Bears podcaster was literally, "What can you tell (Bears fans) about who they just hired to get this offense to where it needs to go?" And then the real fun began. After a couple of "ums...", a full five seconds later Smith-Njigba's first words in his response are, "This is live?"
Seahawks wide receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba says a lot about Shane Waldron by saying nothing
Ouch. No matter what Smith-Njigba says after that start he has already told us about how he really feels. The next bit JSN says begins with "Good luck to y'all." Again, ouch.
JSN did go on to speak well of Waldron, but he basically used the exact same words that he used in a different interview about former head coach Pete Carroll. Smith-Njigba said he was lucky to work with Waldron for a year and he was a good guy and yada yada yada. He finished by saying the "right" things but we already know how he felt about Waldron from the opening seconds of the question.
To be fair the Waldron, he did only have less than a year to work with the talented rookie. But many games went by before Waldron seemed to have a clue as to how to use JSN. The offense might have been much better had Waldron been more creative and prepared.
That was Waldron's issue, though. He often didn't seem ready at the starts of games and instead tried to react to a defense instead of getting a defense to react to the Seahawks offense. Maybe he will do better with the Bears, but I doubt it.