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One thing is pretty obvious . . .
. . . when you look at the approach Joe Douglas is taking with his staff in 2019.
The amount of change is going to be limited as you saw with the news on Wednesday.
The Jets hired Phil Savage as a senior adviser, Rex Hogan as assistant GM and Chad Alexander as director of player personnel. They also added one college scout to replace the one college scout who Adam Gase fired when he was interim GM.
That was about it. A couple of guys who were already there got new titles – Greg Nejmeh is now director of pro personnel, Dan Zbojovsky is now director of personnel operations and Kevin Murphy is assistant director of pro scouting. These guys helped Gase a great deal during his time as interim GM.
Did you notice they didn’t name a new college scouting director? That is a major job in any NFL operation. That was Mike Maccagnan’s position for a long time with the Houston Texans before he came to the Jets.
While Zbojovsky now has a bigger role in overseeing college scouting, Jon Carr, who was hired as college scouting director last May by Maccagnan, is still on the staff.
I saw him at most of the recent practices, including the final spring practice last Thursday.
It’s kind of unusual for a new GM to come in and not hire his own college scouting director.
Yes, it’s very common for a new GM hired right after the season, in let’s say January, to keep the old college scouting director and all the scouts until AFTER the draft. This is because so much heavy-lifting in the scouting process is done by January, like tons of game scouting and campus visits, so you want to keep the guys around who did all that work. Why just throw it away?
But Douglas was hired in June. The draft process is over. So why not just go hire your own college scouting director and scouts. Well it’s possible that Douglas likes Carr and some of the scouts.
But there is clearly something else at work here.
How many contracts can Christopher Johnson eat and pay Douglas $3 million-a-year?
He’s already paying off Todd Bowles (after a Tampa Bay offset), Maccagnan and Brian Heimerdinger.
Bowles and Maccagnan were signed for at least the next two years. A league source told me that Maccagnan actually got a longer extension than Bowles last year, but I’ve never been able to confirm that.
So Johnson is already eating three big contracts. It stands to reason, with all this money being paid to guys not in the building anymore, Johnson needed to draw a line somewhere and ask Douglas to try to keep some of these guys, at least for 2019, and give them a test drive.
Perhaps some of them will leave on their own eventually, not feeling comfortable working for somebody who didn’t hire them, but to expect Johnson to eat the contracts of everyone on the personnel side, and let Douglas replace all or most of them now, might be a bit much financially.
Expect more change in the future, but Douglas seems to be taking it slow at this point.
June 20, 2019
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