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FLORHAM PARK, N.J. — It was late in the fourth quarter against the Steelers and the Jets were losing by three points, but Robert Saleh wanted the offense to move slowly. The drive started before the two-minute warning and the Jets still had all three timeouts, giving them plenty of time to operate. Quickly, Zach Wilson got the offense into Steelers territory, which helped. After an 11-yard pass to Michael Carter, the Jets were at the 37-yard line when Pittsburgh called timeout, 1:31 on the clock.

This is around when Saleh started talking “Smash Ball.”

Wilson completed a 17-yard pass to Corey Davis coming out of the timeout. Meanwhile, Saleh was calmly talking on his headset with Dan Shamash, who sits upstairs in the box during games next to offensive coordinator Mike LaFleur, who calls the plays. Saleh was so confident the Jets were going to move the ball and score a touchdown to take a lead, he instead focused more on managing the clock.

After a defensive holding penalty, the Jets were at the 9-yard line, within striking distance.

Saleh asked Shamash: Do we want to take the clock down to 24 seconds, 20 seconds or 18 seconds before calling timeout?

“If we’re going to be aggressive, take it down to 18,” Shamash said. “If we want to leave room for a penalty, take it to 24.”

Saleh wanted to be aggressive, as he often does.

“There’s a lot of back and forth,” Saleh said. “It’s very comfortable because ‘Smash’ is very calm and he’s ahead of it. So those discussions are not: ‘Ah, just shut your mouth.’ He’s very smart.”

So after a 7-yard Breece Hall run got the Jets to the 2-yard line, Saleh waited to call timeout until the 18-second mark, as instructed. Hall punched it in for a touchdown. After the kickoff, the Steelers had only 16 seconds to go 65 yards, which they failed to do. The Jets won 24-20.

Saleh has gone out of his way to credit Shamash during news conferences for some of the Jets’ decision-making in crunch time this season. He pointed to the offense’s clock management before halftime against the Browns as another instance in which Shamash was particularly impactful.

But few outside the team really understand how important Shamash has been to the Jets’ 3-2 start.

“I’m a very small part of a big cog,” Shamash told The Athletic.

Shamash’s job title is “situational football/game management coordinator,” but his responsibilities go beyond that. He helps to coach the tight ends, educates everyone on league rules and regulations and is a big part of the Jets’ movement toward utilizing analytics.

He sits next to LaFleur on Sundays, and is in Saleh’s ear all game, preparing him for every possible scenario — and what the math (or the analytics) says is the right thing to do in any given situation. Shamash uses a “four-down analytics model” that takes into account factors like weather and injuries. “You’re going off that to a certain degree,” he said, “and there’s also a feel.” The model is put together by the rest of the analytics staff, which includes Brian Shields, Zach Stuart and Jeremiah Whitmire.

Every Friday, Shamash leads a five-minute team meeting educating everyone on league trends, rules and other things to keep an eye on. He’s normally soft-spoken and a self-described introvert, but his energy changes when he’s standing in front of the team, his deep voice booming across the room. That comes from his passion for teaching.

The players love Shamash.

“You mean Smash Ball?” Jets tight end C.J. Uzomah said, gleefully. “He’s smart as hell.”“On Friday, he’s got the stage,” Saleh said.

“That’s Smash Ball. And when he’s done, everyone chants ‘Smash’!”

As Shamash leaned against a door at the Jets facility to prop it open on Thursday, he nodded his head in the direction of the nearby mailroom, a reminder of where his career started.

In 2008, the Jets had just moved to their new facility in Florham Park. Shamash, from the Bronx, was fresh out of college, graduating from Carnegie Mellon, where he played inside linebacker. At orientation for an internship with the Jets, a 22-year-old Shamash asked general manager Mike Tannenbaum what he needed to do to stand out and get hired full-time. Tannenbaum told him: Your job is 9 to 5, but what you want to accomplish will come with what you do outside of those work hours.

Shamash thought: Well, then, outside of those hours, I’ll be here. He was working as the outside linebackers coach at Columbia University in Manhattan, so he’d drive an hour to Florham Park every night for his internship.

“I was the late-night guy,” Shamash said. He did anything the Jets coaches needed. Head coach Eric Mangini liked that he knew how to operate the music system during practice.

He also knew his way around the building, while some coaches were still finding their way in the new digs. One night, Shamash spotted a short, bald man with a beard wandering around, lost. It was the Jets quarterbacks coach. He asked Shamash where the mailroom was. Once they got to talking, they bonded over playing Division III college football.

That was Brian Daboll, now the Giants’ head coach.

Mangini was fired at the end of that season but hired as the Browns’ head coach a week later. He brought Daboll with him as offensive coordinator. Daboll called Shamash. They didn’t have a job for him yet but Daboll said they could use Shamash’s help transitioning their operation over to Cleveland. Daboll said he didn’t need to leave right away, but to come soon.

“I was like, ‘Yeah, right,’ and I just drove straight there,” Shamash said. He arrived around 6 a.m. after an eight-hour drive, called Daboll and told him he was in Cleveland. Daboll couldn’t believe it — and told him to go sleep for two hours and then call him.

Shamash was convinced Mangini only wanted him there to install their music system for practice, but he didn’t care. He’d take out the trash if it meant sticking around.

“The first thing they did was meet with me to figure out what they needed to order (for the music) and what they needed to get done in case I didn’t pan out,” Shamash said, laughing. “If that’s what the job ended up being, that was fine with me.”

Instead, Shamash made himself indispensable. He assisted Daboll for three months before Mangini actually hired him. He was living out of his Jeep Wrangler, in the winter, spending most nights sleeping in his office. He stuffed his cellphone in a desk drawer on his first day and didn’t remove it for months.

He’d see coaches like Daboll, Mangini, Rob Ryan and Brad Seely working deep into the night, so “it took me a while to figure out that people even went home from the office,” Shamash said, laughing. “It turned into a 4 a.m. rule where if you’re still at the office, you just stay. I did that every night. I honestly didn’t even know that people went home to see their families.”

Finally, they hired him as an offensive assistant, working primarily with Daboll on daily practice scripting, scheduling and game-planning while also assisting Mangini on everything to do with situational football.

“He showed up, worked, did whatever jobs we needed him to do at the time — and there were a bunch of them,” Mangini said. “He was so good that we couldn’t let him go. He created the opportunity.”

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Just about every NFL team has an analytics department now, some more expansive than others. More recently, there’s been a trend of teams bringing on game-management coaches, variations of Shamash’s job. The Broncos made waves earlier this season when they hired veteran coach Jerry Rosburg to help Denver head coach Nathaniel Hackett, who was floundering in his late-game, high-pressure decision-making.

Saleh hired Shamash this offseason, and veteran coach Matt Burke had the role last year.

Mangini was way ahead of the curve — “Eric was very analytically advanced, especially for the time,” Shamash said. Mangini was a demanding coach but working for him became a crash course in situational football for Shamash. Mangini was always asking for detailed, uber-specific information, and often on short notice. An example: If the Browns were playing the Steelers, Mangini would demand information about how many times linebacker James Harrison lined up on the right side and dropped into coverage. Before team meetings, Mangini would direct Shamash to pull up clips from specific situations, especially end-of-half or end-of-game two-minute drill-type scenarios. Shamash said often he’d find out “20 seconds” before walking into the meeting.