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He was asked a gutsy question last week.
Q)Did you make a long-term commitment to the wrong guys?
“I completely disagree with the idea that Mike (Maccagnan) and Todd (Bowles) are the wrong guys,” Christopher Johnson said. “I wouldn’t have extended them if I didn’t think that they were the right guys to take this team forward. I love working with them. I have great respect for them and their roles.”
Of course he “completely disagrees with that idea.” He now has them under contract for the next three years.
The first big news to come out after the contract extensions is the arrest of cornerback Rashard Robinson, in Hanover Township for possessing marijuana candy, and then a missed his court. That is a bad optic.
It’s hard to have “great respect” for that trade.
That trade was a case of very poor judgement. Robinson is a guy who had issues at LSU where he was thrown out, and then had issues with San Francisco, so why would you trade a fifth-round pick for a guy with long paper-trail of problems.
This was not a good idea.
Look – here is the problem with this whole scenario.
It’s the evaluation process.
Christopher Johnson is a great guy, but is he the best guy to evaluate the nuances of the job that Todd Bowles and Mike Maccagnan did this year?
Listen, Johnson is a smart guy, but is evaluating the personnel moves of Maccagnan, and the coaching of Johnson, in his wheelhouse?
And his right-hand man is Ira Axselrad, a brilliant lawyer, but not a football-guy. Axselrad runs “The Johnson Company” which manages the the family man.
So when you have Johnson and Axselrad, who come from a world outside of NFL player personnel and X’s and O’s, evaluating the job being done by the football people, the decisions might be a little different than what a football chief like Bill Polian or John Elway might make.
Hey, the Jets aren’t the only team with this set-up, but I don’t think their corporate structure, related to football (I’m not talking about the business side), isn’t ideal.
Both Maccagnan and Bowles are on the same level in the Jets’ corporate structure, and they both report to Johnson. So Maccagnan has nothing to do with the evaluating of the coach.
During the season, during his mid-season press briefing, Maccagnan was asked by a couple of reporters, new to the scene, if Bowles had earned a contract extension.
The guys who asked these questions assumed that Bowles reported to Maccagnan. Good assumption – the football coach being evaluated by the football GM.
Maccagnan said it’s not up to him, much to the surprise of these two new guys.
The assumed that a football guy would be evaluating the coach.
He’s not.
And no football person is evaluating Bowles and Maccagnan.
And this is a flawed set-up in my opinion.
Like I said Johnson and Axselrad are very smart men in real world terms.
But if you are going to evaluate the job the coach and GM have done, you really new a pure football guy to do so.
Otherwise the evaluation process is a little flawed.
Hey, things could work out great for Johnson and his GM/coach moving forward.
We shall see.
I just wonder about the process that led to the extensions.
January 10, 2017
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