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Strange days indeed . . .
Most peculiar.
Everyone is wondering about Todd Bowles future.
A lot of speculation that Bowles is going to get fired.
But is it fake news?
Right now it is.
What do I mean by that?
There was a column in the New York Post that Bowles was coaching for his job against the Bills?
Who said that?
The columnist.
Then that columnist fired him after the Bills’ game.
But obviously that columnist doesn’t run the Jets.
And Christopher Johnson had no intention of making a coach change mid-season.
I can’t tell you if he’s going to make a coaching change after this season.
Rex Ryan says he is.
“He’s gone,” Ryan said on ESPN about Bowles.
Not sure what his source is on that.
But he does have good insight on what goes into the Johnson Brothers firing coaches.
What bothers me about all this is the way reporters and analysts talk like something is about to happen, and they really have no idea, they are just speculating.
Yet they act like they know what is about to happen.
I can assure you nobody in power at One Jets Drive is telling outsiders that Todd Bowles is definitely going to be fired.
So why are they talking like they know?
Christopher Johnson isn’t telling people that.
I talk to him all the time at practice, and I never got the impression a coaching change was in the offing. He was just focused on getting things fixed and the team improving
Now I didn’t talk to him after the Buffalo game, or this week, but there are a lot of conclusions being jumped to in the click-bait world.
Like for instance, some were making the meeting between Bowles and Johnson on the Monday after the Bills’ game as some kind of summit at Camp David. Why? They meet every Monday. But some made it seem like Bowles was going to find out his fate Monday. That narrative was totally inaccurate.
And the other thing you heard a lot that it was a big deal that Johnson didn’t talk to reporters after the Bills’ game. He was whisked out of the stadium by his security team. He never talks to the media after games, so why make a big deal about what happened after the Buffalo game?
Look, I’m not here to tell you whether he’s going to be fired or not, but like I said the other day, Chris Johnson isn’t the in-season firing type – he’s not George Steinbrenner or Jimmy Haslam. He’s not just like that.
The only nugget I can offer here is that I heard that GM Mike Maccagnan got a longer extension than Bowles, so perhaps he has a little more power than the coach (they used to be equals), so if the Jets do make a coaching change, he will probably survive, and on top of that, help pick the new coach.
But I’m not here to create news, just report it.
And to me, some of the reporting around the Bills game was creative writing, but not all fact-based.
November 15, 2018
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