The New York Jets placed defensive lineman Rashad Weaver on season-ending injured reserve and released defensive tackle Phidarian Mathis on Thursday, when their acquisition of nose tackle Harrison Phillips became official.
Phillips played the past three seasons for Minnesota after spending his first four with Buffalo. The Jets and Vikings agreed to a trade Wednesday night, pending Phillips passing his physical. New York also acquired a 2027 seventh-round draft pick from Minnesota, which received sixth-rounders in 2026 and 2027.
That move came a few hours after the Jets made another addition to their defensive line when they acquired defensive tackle Jowon Briggs and a seventh-rounder next year from Cleveland for a sixth-rounder.
The Jets also waived cornerback Ryan “Bump” Cooper with an injury designation. He was claimed off waivers from Miami last month.
Weaver was signed as a free agent by the Jets in March and expected to be part of New York's defensive line rotation. The nature of Weaver's injury was not immediately known and it wasn't clear when it occurred.
Weaver, who has 5 1/2 career sacks and 15 quarterback hits in four NFL seasons, was waived by Tennessee last summer after being a fourth-rounder out of Pitt in 2021. He signed with Houston’s practice squad and played in three games for the Texans before being waived and finishing last season on the Los Angeles Rams’ practice squad.
Mathis was claimed by the Jets off waivers from Washington last December. He was a second-round pick of the Commanders out of Alabama in 2022. Mathis has 25 total tackles in 23 games over three NFL seasons.
The 6-foot-3, 307-pound Phillips started every game during his tenure with Minnesota and provides a veteran presence next to Pro Bowl defensive tackle Quinnen Williams. A third-round pick out of Stanford in 2018, Phillips has eight career sacks, five fumble recoveries and is regarded as a top run stuffer.
He signed a three-year, $19.5 million contract with the Vikings in 2022 and then was signed to a two-year extension in September.
“Harrison has meant so much to our team and our locker room since his arrival in Minnesota three years ago," Vikings coach Kevin O'Connell said in a statement in the team's release announcing the trade. “He brought leadership, professionalism and consistency, helping set a standard for the culture we wanted to create.”
AP Pro Football Writer Dave Campbell in Eagan, Minnesota, contributed.
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New York Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart (6) reacts after being sacked by New York Jets defensive tackle Phidarian Mathis (98) during the second quarter of an NFL football game, Saturday, Aug. 16, 2025, in East Rutherford, N.J. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)
FILE - Minnesota Vikings defensive tackle Harrison Phillips (97) lines up against the Las Vegas Raiders during the first half of an NFL football game, Dec. 10, 2023, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Rick Scuteri, File)
The Pentagon said Thursday that it is changing the independent military newspaper Stars and Stripes so it concentrates on “reporting for our warfighters” and no longer includes “woke distractions.”
That message, in a social media post from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's spokesman, is short on specifics and does not mention the news outlet's legacy of independence from government and military leadership. It comes a day after The Washington Post reported that applicants for jobs at Stars and Stripes were being asked what they would do to support President Donald Trump's policies.
Stars and Stripes traces its lineage to the Civil War and has reported news about the military either in its newspaper or online steadily since World War II, largely to an audience of service members stationed overseas. Roughly half of its budget comes from the Pentagon and its staff members are considered Defense Department employees.
The outlet's mission statement emphasizes that it is “editorially independent of interference from outside its own editorial chain-of-command” and that it is unique among news organizations tied to the Defense Department in being “governed by the principles of the First Amendment.”
Congress established that independence in the 1990s after instances of military leadership getting involved in editorial decisions. During Trump's first term in 2020, Defense Secretary Mark Esper tried to eliminate government funding for Stars and Stripes — to effectively shut it down — before he was overruled by the president.
Hegseth's spokesman, Sean Parnell, said on X Thursday that the Pentagon “is returning Stars and Stripes to its original mission: reporting for our warfighters.” He said the department will “refocus its content away from woke distractions.”
“Stars and Stripes will be custom tailored to our warfighters,” Parnell wrote. “It will focus on warfighting, weapons systems, fitness, lethality, survivability and ALL THINGS MILITARY. No more repurposed DC gossip columns; no more Associated Press reprints.”
Parnell did not return a message seeking details. The Daily Wire reported, after speaking a Pentagon spokeswoman, that the plan is to have all Stars and Stripes content written by active-duty service members. Currently, Congress has mandated that the publication's publisher and top editor be civilians, said Max Lederer, its publisher.
The Pentagon also said that half of the outlet's content would be generated by the Defense Department, and that it would no longer publish material from The Associated Press or Reuters news services.
Also Thursday, the Pentagon issued a statement in the Federal Register that it would eliminate some 1990s era directives that governed how Stars and Stripes operates. Lederer said it's not clear what that would mean for the outlet's operations, or whether the Defense Department has the authority to do so without congressional authorization.
The publisher said he believes that Stars and Stripes is valued by the military community precisely because of its independence as a news organization. He said no one at the Pentagon has communicated to him what it wants from Stars and Stripes; he first learned of its intentions from reading Parnell's social media post.
“This will either destroy the value of the organization or significantly reduce its value,” Lederer said.
Jacqueline Smith, the outlet's ombudsman, said Stars and Stripes reports on matters important to service members and their families — not just weapons systems or war strategy — and she's detected nothing “woke” about its reporting.
“I think it's very important that Stars and Stripes maintains its editorial independence, which is the basis of its credibility,” Smith said. A longtime newspaper editor in Connecticut, Smith's role was created by Congress three decades ago and she reports to the House Armed Services Committee.
It's the latest move by the Trump administration to impose restrictions on journalists. Most reporters from legacy news outlets have left the Pentagon rather than to agree to new rules imposed by Hegseth that they feel would give him too much control over what they report and write. The New York Times has sued to overturn the regulations.
Trump has also sought to shut down government-funded outlets like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that report independent news about the world in countries overseas.
Also this week, the administration raided the home of a Washington Post journalist as part of an investigation into a contractor accused of stealing government secrets, a move many journalists interpreted as a form of intimidation.
The Post reported that applicants to Stars and Stripes were being asked how they would advance Trump's executive orders and policy priorities in the role. They were asked to identify one or two orders or initiatives that were significant to them. That raised questions about whether it was appropriate for a journalist to be given what is, in effect, a loyalty test.
Smith said it was the government's Office of Personnel Management — not the newspaper — that was responsible for the question on job applications and said it was consistent with what was being asked of applicants for other government jobs.
But she said it was not something that should be asked of journalists. “The loyalty is to the truth, not the administration,” she said.
David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social.
US soldier Sgt. John Hubbuch of Versailles, Ky., one of the members of NATO led-peacekeeping forces in Bosnia reads Stars and Stripes newspaper on Sunday Feb. 14, 1999. (AP Photo/Amel Emric, File)
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stands outside the Pentagon during a welcome ceremony for Japanese Defense Minister Shinjirō Koizumi at the Pentagon, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026 in Washington. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf/)
FILE - A GI with the U.S. 25th division reads Stars and Stripes newspaper at Cu Chi, South Vietnam on Sept. 10, 1969. (AP Photo/Mark Godfrey)
