J-E-T-S Jets, Jets, Jets!

Yesterday afternoon, the NY Jets fired their GM, Joe Douglas.  This comes soon on the heels of firing the head coach, Robert Saleh earlier in the season.  This morning, there is a report at CBSSports.com saying that Jets’ owner, Woody Johnson, wanted to bench Aaron Rodgers after the Jets lost to the Broncos in Week 4 of this year.  [Aside:  The Jets’ backup QB is Tyrod Taylor.]  This must be an unusual level of turmoil even for Jets’ fans who have continued to follow a team that has only posted 2 winning seasons since 2010.

My first thought here was that Jets’ fans might want to root for President-elect Trump to appoint Johnson to the job Johnson held in the first Trump administration – – US Ambassador to the UK.  That would remove him from the “leadership role” Johnson executes with the Jets and keep him busy elsewhere.  But then I wondered how the Jets performed in the time when Christopher Johnson – – Woody’s brother and co-owner of the Jets – – was leading the way.

Woody Johnson served as US Ambassador to the UK from November 2017 until January 2021.  Essentially, Christopher Johnson was in charge of the 2018 – 2020 iterations of the Jets.  Here are the data:

• 2018:  Jets were 4-12 and last in the AFC East.  Fired coach Todd Bowles
• 2019:  Jets were 7-9 and 3^rd in the AFC East.  Hired coach Adam Gase
• 2020:  Jets were 2-14 and last in the AFC East.  Fired coach Adam Gase.

            Let us just agree to say that the years under Christopher Johnson’s guidance were something less than an unalloyed success.  So, maybe Jets’ fans should not be trying to whisper in President-elect Trump’s ear…

So, the Jets’ will do a thorough housecleaning in the upcoming off-season.  Soon, you will be reading about rumors related to whom Johnson’s people are talking to about which job and etc.  Before that speculation begins and then turns fanciful, let me ask a rational question:

• If you were a  young hot prospect in the NFL coaching universe looking for a place to launch your career that will hopefully land you a slot in the Pro Football Hall of Fame as a coach, would you take the Jets’ job in 2025?

You can answer that question from two perspectives:

1. As noted above, the Jets have been a miserable failure as a team for at least the last 15 years and have not been in the playoffs since 2010.  So, if a young hotshot coach goes there and turns the franchise around so that it makes the playoffs in 2026 and maybe wins a game in the playoffs in 2027 and then plays for the Conference Championship in 2028, that would be a great launching to a coaching career.  OR …
2. The Jets’ roster is merely decent and not great.  Aaron Rodgers will be 41 years old, and it will cost more than $20M in cap space to move on from him.  Rodgers is also a certified prima donna who may or may not buy into any sort of new regimen offered up by a young hotshot coach. Moreover, the Jets’ record shows that they have hired “rookie head coaches” all the way back to the days of Bill Parcells in the 1990s and none of them have gone on to greater glory after their time in the Jets’ locker room.

Moving on – – but staying with the topic of NFL head coaches …  Jon Gruden signed a multi-year deal with Barstool Sports.  I have not been able to figure out exactly what he is going to do there, but Gruden does post videos on You Tube periodically and they are insightful if not spectacularly entertaining.  It is no secret that Barstool Sports’ founder, Dave Portnoy, is not highly regarded by the NFL brass.  Barstool and Portnoy himself are “pot-stirrers” in the media world and the NFL prefers to be the only one’s stirring the NFL cauldron.

As an example of Barstool’s pot-stirring, recall that when “Deflategate” was a cause celebre, several Barstool employees were arrested for staging a sit-in at NFL HQs demanding to speak to Commissioner roger Goodell about his suspension of Tom Brady.  The NFL chose to ban Barstool from its events and at one of the Super Bowl games, Portnoy allegedly produced a counterfeit media credential for himself and was “escorted out” of the stadium once he was discovered.

Recall also that Jon Gruden still has a pending lawsuit against the NFL for wrongful termination, so the combination of Barstool Sports along with an active litigant against the league is sure to produce nothing by warm feelings along Mahogany Row in NFL HQs.  I don’t know where all that is going, but it might be fun …

Finally, having mentioned Bill Parcells in passing above, let me close with two of his observations today:

“I’ll call somebody ‘dumb’ or ‘stupid’ if they make a dumb or stupid play. I don’t know any other word for it, and if they don’t like the word, that’s too bad.”

And …

“When you don’t know that you don’t know, it’s a lot different than when you do know that you don’t know.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………