GM Joe Douglas on Jets O-Line: The Goal Is to ‘Find Five Guys That Can Play Together All Year’

It all looked so good last summer.

The Jets offensive line appeared to be a solid five-man unit. Mekhi Becton was expected back from a knee injury. More good things were expected in Alijah Vera-Tucker’s sophomore season. GM Joe Douglas signed the veteran guard Laken Tomlinson in free agency. George Fant was coming off a strong 15-game 2021 season. Connor McGovern was again the rock at center.

And then, a unit that looked so go good, so promising (and that added Max Mitchell in the draft) suddenly wasn’t.

“I think when I talked about consistency and stability with the whole offense, I think you can go right there with the offensive line,” Douglas said during his season-ending news conference earlier this week. “I think, we come into training camp and it’s going to be George and Laken and Connor and AVT and Mekhi, and that quickly changed, right? And so, we get Duane [Brown] in here and we lose Duane in a non-padded practice for four weeks, so there’s change there. Max comes in, does a great job filling in, so I guess my big point is it was hard to find a level of consistency and stability within that group this year.”

The Jets went with nine different combinations on the offensive line, a situation that had a huge impact on the passing and the running games. In the final five games of the season, the Jets rushed for 305 yards — and a big part of that decline came with the loss to season-ending injuries of rookie running back Breece Hall (who missed 10 games and still led the club in rushing with 463 yards) and Vera-Tucker (who played three positions before his triceps injury) in the Week 7 game at Denver.

“And despite all of the change upfront, I really felt like we were in a good place after that first Buffalo game,” Douglas said. “Remember that fourth-quarter drive [13 plays over 86 yards, 10 of them runs to the winning field goal], our last offensive drive. I think it was a six-minute drive [6:10], we were running the ball really well.

“It felt like we had really…