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A heaping helping . . .
The Jets are clearly very interested in Mike McCarthy for their head coaching spot.
From what I hear, they met for 12 hours with the former Green Bay Packers coach on Saturday at the Jockey Hollow Restaurant in Morristown.
I was shocked when I was told 12 hours, but that is what the source said.
This a five-star restaurant, located in an mansion built in 1917, and is Mike Maccagnan’s favorite restaurant.
I hear they got a private room for the meeting.
To me, a 12-hour meeting means you are darn serious about the candidate.
McCarthy makes a lot of sense for the Jets who are in dire need of a coach who can develop their quarterbacks, and McCarthy has a long history of coaching quarterbacks.
As a long-time QB coach, he coached signal-callers in Kansas City like Rich Gannon, Elvis Grbac, and then Brett Favre in Green Bay and Alex Smith in San Francisco.
Obviously he also coached Aaron Rodgers for a long-time in Green Bay. The relationship soured at the end, but like that old saying goes, “Familiarity breeds contempt.” They were together 13 years and finally got sick of each other. Al Davis always felt that no head coach should stay with a team more than 10 years because their message starts to get stale.
Something else to consider about McCarthy. For the longest time he had a GM, Ted Thompson, who wasn’t a big believer in free agency. He wanted to build through the draft. Hey, building through the draft is great, but you when you have a QB like Rodgers, you probably should be looking for more free agent pieces to push you over the top.
Finally, in 2017, Thompson’s last year in Green Bay, he was forced by the team president to be more active in free agency. But there were some wasted years he could have done more.
Look, I’m not making McCarthy into Vince Lombardi, but I think he would be solid for the Jets with his 13 years of NFL head coaching experience.
Also, with his experience coaching quarterbacks, he would be very helpful to Sam Darnold.
I also like Todd Monken who the Jets interviewed today – a top-shelf offensive mind, who is no-nonsense, and has head coaching experience from three years at Southern Mississippi.
I think either one would be a good choice . . .
From a player personnel standpoint, the hiring of Todd Bowles as defensive coordinator in Tampa Bay doesn’t make much sense.
They have been building a Tampa-Two defense down there forever. It’s a 4-3 defense with smaller, faster, run-and-hit linebackers, like Lavonte David (6-1, 234) and Kwon Alexander (6-1, 227).
Bowles is a 3-4 coach, and as we have seen from Darron Lee, smaller, faster linebackers, who aren’t built to stack-and-shed linemen, struggle in his system.
This is kind of like Arizona from 2018 in reverse. The Cardinals have been playing the 3-4 for a while, including a couple of years under Bowles, and they hired Steve Wilks, who likes to play a system similar to Tampa Bay, and there were a lot of players out of position this year,and you saw the kind of season Arizona had, ending with Wilks getting fired.
I understand Bowles and Arians are close, but Bruce, look at the personnel you are taking over.
January 8, 2019
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