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Woody Johnson and Joe Douglas were never a good fit.
Douglas signed up for one job, and had that job his first couple of years with the team, but then in 2021, he got a new boss, and everything changed.
Many of us have been through that. You get hired by one person you connected with, and that person leaves, you get a new boss, and it’s like oil and water.
Christopher Johnson was very hands-off, and let his football people do their thing. Woody is very hands-on.
So Douglas, and Robert Saleh, to a degree, were hired by one boss, and ended up working for another with a different modus operandi.
When I would observe Woody talking to Joe on the sidelines at practice, Joe’s body language looked like somebody at a Christmas party cornered by the French onion dip having a long talk with somebody they didn’t jive with.
If you saw Douglas’ mid-season press briefing, he came across as a guy who wasn’t long for his current job. O
One fan on Twitter said the press conference looked like a “hostage tape.”
“Joe Douglas contract was up after this season,” ESPN’s Adam Schefter said today. “I don’t know if he wanted to stay there anyway, but the Jets made it simple for him today.”
So in some ways, this was a mercy killing.
Douglas didn’t seem happy the last of years.
Putting his relationship with Woody aside, while he made some good draft choices like Garrett Wilson and Breece Hall, some dubious moves perhaps impacted his job status:
*The Haason Reddick trade made no sense without his contract situation being resolved before the deal was consummated. You traded for somebody else’s contract dispute. I’ve never covered the scenario before. Weird.
*Signing two 33-year-old offensive tackles, coming off injuries the previous year, turned out to be a mistake. Both got hurt again, and when healthy, have given up too much pressure off the edge, including in the Arizona game, to a pair of pedestrian edge-rushers.
*Going with three undrafted rookies in the defensive line room was bizarre. All three seem to be practice squad players at this point.
*Douglas listened way too much to Robert Saleh when it came to defensive personnel decisions and it came back to bite this team in a major way. Saleh falls in love with people, and seems to watch film with rose-colored glasses, continuing to roll with guys who hurt their defense. The GM needed to push back and say, “We are moving on [fill in the blank] – the film sucks.” But he didn’t do it enough. And it’s continuing to hurt this team under Jeff Ulbrich because he’s stuck with some players who make the same mistakes over and over, but its hard to get replacements in November.
*The defense was so bad the last two weeks, against Arizona and Indy, making two QBs with a lot of bad tape over the last couple of years, look like Peyton Manning. Now you can blame Ulbrich for that, but a lot of it is personnel-related. Too many players lack top-shelf instincts and are out of position a lot. Why does this defense have too many players devoid of good instincts? Because they “strain” a lot as the former coach loved to say about hustle. Straining is fine, but without good instincts, what good is it? Douglas should have focused more on defensive players with top-shelf instincts.
*I’m not going to blame Douglas for the Davante Adams trade which created dysfunction on offense, trying to integrate a #1 receiver into an attack that already had a #1 receiver, in-season.
But after watching the defense the last two weeks, if you are the owner, something had to give. That defense that Douglas constructed with too much input from a head coach who gets too attached to players impacting his judgment, was an embarrassment.
Woody making Phil Savage the interim GM is a tremendous move, and if Phil is interested, he should be given consideration for the full-time job. Really good player football man with a ton of experience.
But if Savage doesn’t want the job, or is not in consideration, he needs to be very involved in the search. It can’t be spearheaded by money managers and lawyers. That would not be ideal.
November 19-20, 2024
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