Todd Bowles’ trick for avoiding Giants-like chaos with Jets

With four games left in the season and their playoff hopes hanging on by a thread, the Jets plan to follow their leader.

Even through the tough decisions.

Todd Bowles kept his players in check Sunday, when he made linebacker Darron Lee inactive and benched defensive lineman Muhammad Wilkerson for most of the first quarter, both for being late — Lee to a practice and Wilkerson to a meeting — during the week.

“[Bowles] has held everybody accountable week in and week out,” left tackle Kelvin Beachum said Monday. “Nobody gets a pass. There’s no favoritism. He says what he says, he does what he does, and it’s consistent. … When you show that and when you have instances as a coach where you have to hold somebody accountable and you do it, that shows that you’re living up to your word.”

Bowles stood by his decisions immediately after the Jets beat the Chiefs 38-31 and again a day later. He already said both Lee and Wilkerson will be active again Sunday against the Broncos but felt his standards needed to be upheld.

“You treat everybody like grown men, which they are,” Bowles said. “There are consequences and repercussions for everything that we do here. We have rules that we go by and you treat them like men. You put in a hard day’s work. We take no wooden nickels. I don’t believe in beating around the bush. I don’t want nobody to beat around the bush with me.”

In order to weed out those “wooden nickels” Bowles said the “coaches need to know the players inside and out” and vice versa.

This is the third straight year Wilkerson has been disciplined for being late. He apologized after it happened last year and said as a leader, he needed to be better and it wouldn’t be an issue moving forward.

Yet on Sunday, he was back in the same spot.

“It’s part of the game, no different than raising your kids,” Bowles said. “They’re going to do some things and you’re going to be pissed off, but you love them up the next day and keep it moving.”

Bowles still considers Wilkerson one of his team’s leaders but said “time will tell” whether the issues would resurface.

“You earn trust,” Bowles said. “They earned a lot of trust. You make a mistake and you lose a little trust, and you just gotta earn it back.”

Several players vouched for Bowles after Sunday’s win, and Beachum offered more praise Monday, saying he’d “run through a wall” for the third-year coach.

“I’m here for a long time, and I hope he’s here for a long time because when you have coaches like that you believe in, that you trust, it’s important,” Beachum said. “Control what we control, do what we do. It’s about the New York Jets and nobody else.”

The team is taking that same approach for the final four weeks of the season. Plenty of things have to go right for the Jets to make the playoffs, but none of that will matter unless they take care of business and win out.

They already have surpassed the expectations most had for them entering the season, though they never cared for those expectations in the first place.

“If you believe the sky is blue and a whole bunch of people tell you it’s green, you’re going to keep believing it’s blue because that’s what you believe,” quarterback Josh McCown said. “It’s the same thing for us. As a group, when you believe in each other and what you’re trying to accomplish, it doesn’t matter what everybody else thinks. The only thing that matters is the guys in the locker room and the coaches in that building.”