Sauce Gardner gets paid to make life miserable for quarterbacks, but he felt compelled to uplift Will Levis in a moment when compassion was needed.
After the Kentucky quarterback Levis surprisingly tumbled out of the first round of the NFL Draft last Thursday, Gardner, the reigning NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year wrote on Twitter, “Will Levis… God makes no mistakes. You will be great.”
Gardner, who was in Kansas City for draft festivities, explained the thinking behind his message of encouragement Wednesday at the Jets practice facility.
“I was watching the draft and I just kept seeing the camera on him, and they were just saying the percentage of him getting picked after a certain pick,” Gardner said Wednesday.
“The camera kept being on him, and you can see when somebody is trying to stay positive even though something is really eating them from the inside out.”
Sauce Gardner felt for Will Levis as the NFL Draft cameras kept cutting to him. Bill Kostroun/New York PostLevis, who was projected to go as high as the No. 4 pick by some experts, landed with the Tennessee Titans on the second pick of the second round after he left Kansas City and returned home to Connecticut to be out of the spotlight Friday night.
“I’m an empath myself, so I was kind of feeling what he was feeling,” Gardner said. “Just sitting there, all eyes on him, him probably knowing deep down that he wasn’t going to get picked in Round 1. I felt like I just had to say that.”
Unless they meet in the playoffs this season, the Jets and Titans don’t play until 2024.
By then, Levis might have supplanted Ryan Tannehill as the starting quarterback and could be trying to throw against Gardner’s suffocating coverage.
Levis, expected to be a top pick in the 2023 NFL Draft, was left alone in the green room in an awkward scene. Getty ImagesGardner was the No. 4 pick in the 2022 NFL Draft, so he didn’t have to wait long at all to hear his name called.
