Haason Reddick’s standoff with the Jets re-teaches some lessons the Eagles learned with T.O.

Have you ever experienced sensory nostalgia?

Of course you have. You might not have used that vaguely clinical term to describe the sensation, but you’ve felt it, no doubt. We all have.

You smell a batch of baking cookies, and the aroma transports you back to your mother’s kitchen when you were a kid. You hear a particular pop song, and you’re 19, hanging with your friends at a dorm-room party. The temperature drops a couple of degrees on an early September evening, and you might as well be standing on the sideline of your high school’s football field, waiting for the season’s opening kickoff.

You see Haason Reddick in the midst of a contract dispute with the New York Jets, and suddenly it’s the summer of 2005, and you’re watching Terrell Owens crunch his stomach in his driveway.

Hey, you have your treasured memories. I have mine.

Traded by the Eagles back in April, Reddick hasn’t shown up for training camp and reportedly requested that the Jets trade him. Now, his holdout isn’t nearly the attention-seeking spectacle that Owens’ was, and in terms of his effect on the locker room, Reddick hasn’t been nearly the disruption to the Jets that Owens was to the Eagles. It’s tough to disrupt anything when you’re not around. But there are a couple of important commonalities — factors that should have been instructive to NFL teams when Owens caused his ruckus and that the Jets, in acquiring and negotiating with Reddick, either ignored or didn’t properly consider.

Broadly speaking, Owens’ and Reddick’s situations were identical. Each agreed to a contract with the Eagles when they acquired him. Each made it clear he was unhappy with that contract after his first season with the team. And each made it clear that he was unhappy because he believed that after one season, he had already outperformed the contract and deserved a more lucrative deal.

» READ MORE: Eagles-Patriots what we learned: Time to call a winner at right guard position battle. What about cornerback?

Owens signed a seven-year deal worth as much as $49 million after the Eagles got him in that complex trade/settlement with the San Francisco 49ers and the Baltimore Ravens. He had 77 receptions for 1,200 yards and 14 touchdowns during the regular season, then was the Eagles’ best player in Super Bowl XXXIX, catching nine passes for 122 yards on a surgically repaired ankle. That performance (and his decision to hire a new agent, Drew Rosenhaus) persuaded him that he had earned the right to renegotiate his contract, and when the Eagles refused, he went full-Heath Ledger-in-face-paint.

In 2022, Reddick and the Eagles reached an agreement on a three-year free-agent deal that could have paid him up to $45 million. After posting 16 sacks during the regular season and another 3½ in the Eagles’ two playoff victories, Reddick missed a couple of days of training camp last summer before admitting that he believed he was underpaid.

There were lessons to be learned from the Owens fiasco, and the Eagles showed that, at least in this situation, they had learned them — and the Jets have shown they haven’t. The first lesson is simple and would seem obvious: In dealing with a pro athlete, a franchise’s decision-makers have to make sure they have an accurate read of the athlete’s personality.

That was the Eagles’ biggest mistake back in the summer of ’05. Owens had arrived in Philadelphia with a track record of trouble-causing. He was mercurial; this was no secret. The notion that the Eagles could tell him, There’s no chance we’re tearing up your current contract and giving you a new one, and his response would be, Oh, OK. Thanks anyway, was wishful thinking at best and arrogant stubbornness (or stubborn arrogance) at worst. There was no way Owens would go quietly, and — surprise! — he didn’t.

(The Eagles made this mistake again in 2020, in misreading how Carson Wentz would react to the drafting of Jalen Hurts. But that error wasn’t nearly as egregious as the one they’d committed 15 years earlier with Owens.)

Similarly, Reddick has never hidden his desire to be paid like one of the five or six best edge-rushers in the NFL (which he is). Everyone knew it when the Eagles (who didn’t want to pay him like one of the five or six best edge-rushers in the NFL) were shopping him. That the Jets would trade for Reddick without the parameters of a new contract already established is nothing but incompetence on their part.

Forget his happy-to-be-here introductory remarks to New York after the trade. Forget that, according to ESPN, the Jets “were under the impression he’d go to training camp under his existing contract,” perhaps because Reddick had told or hinted to them that he would. Forget all that, because what matters is the second lesson: Don’t listen to what a pro sports franchise or athlete says. Watch what that franchise or athlete does.

Reddick already had shown, with the Eagles, that he was willing to sit out part of training camp to signal his dissatisfaction. They understood the lengths to which he would go to get his money, which is why they decided to trade him to a team that, it turned out, didn’t have a clue.

» READ MORE: Bryce Huff’s surprise inclusion in Eagles’ preseason game vs. Patriots leads to encouraging showing