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He fell on his sword again . . .
A couple of weeks ago, Jets coach Adam Gase was very self-critical for not doing a better job developing Sam Darnold.
And his week, he went after himself for letting down Jets owner Christopher Johnson.
“At the end of the day, it’s about winning,” said Gase. “We haven’t done that. For him not to feel a playoff feel of being competitive in December it’s disappointing to me that we haven’t been able to do that for him. I’ve told him multiple times [that] he deserves better, especially with how he is with our players, our staff, our coaches, anybody involved in this organization. I couldn’t ask to work for a better guy.”
Gase has done a poor job as Jets coach, but I don’t think he let Johnson down.
The Jets hiring process in January, 2019 let Johnson down.
I have always been of the opinion, and this applies to any industry, that when a company makes a dubious hire, it’s more on the person or people who made the hire, and not on the person who was hired. It’s a vetting issue.
Rich Kotite is a very nice man, but he wasn’t a head coach; he was a wide receiver or tight end coach. When Leon Hess fired Pete Carroll after one year, and hired Kotite, and Kotite struggled in his two years as head coach, that was on Hess more than Kotite.
Of course there are occasions when somebody seemed like a slam-dunk candidate, and it didn’t work out, but in most cases, if you just vet the candidate well enough, you can avoid getting burned by the hire. Gase wasn’t vetted properly. There was enough evidence from his time in Miami to sidestep this hire.
Johnson got some bad guidance, whether it was from the team’s former GM, and his sidekick, or from Peyton Manning.
It sounds like I’m letting Johnson off the hook here for hiring Gase. Of course I can’t totally do that, but I do think he’s been the victim of some bad advice from people he trusted. Johnson has been learning on the job since taking over his brother in 2017. He’s moving up the growth curve. He came in with a lot to learn. This world was new to him, and he inherited a dysfunctional GM/coach combination, suggested to his brother from consultant Charley Casserly, that worked out terribly. The GM and coach weren’t even on speaking terms for a stretch.
So in 2019, Christopher made a point of staying away from consultants, and leaning on his own football people, keeping Maccagnan and his first lieutenant, around for that interview process.
So his intentions were good, but then Maccagnan scared off a great candidate, Matt Rhule, because he wanted to force Gregg Williams on him. Gase agreed to his bizarre demand, so he got the job.
Christopher is a decent man, and trusted Maccagnan, the football guy in the room, and it backfired on him.
Christopher, as he continues to move up the growth curve as an owner, now knows what a poor job his former GM did advising. He also now knows not to listen to celebrity endorsers with agendas.
And now Christopher has a top-shelf football man to lean on in Joe Douglas, who he can trust, so the process should go better this time around.
But don’t blame Gase for letting Johnson down.
Gase clearly isn’t an head coach. He did the best he could. He wasn’t up to the job.
Gase didn’t let Johnson down. The hiring process in 2019 let Johnson down.
December 17, 2020
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