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Tempe – Over his two years coaching Geno Smith, David Lee (former Jets QB coach) took the high road when talking about the quarterback in rare interviews. He left that road recently.
Look, I don’t want to be one of these reporters who rips coaches when the say nothing, and then rip them when they open up. That is hypocritical. You are putting coaches in a no-win situation when you approach things that way. They can’t win either way.
But I do have an issue with what David Lee said on a radio show on the Bills’ website.
“He had some inconsistency, and the up-and-down part is what killed us,” Lee said last week. “He would get loose with the football. We played good enough defense to win over there both years. But his play, it’ll cost you. And it cost us. But he also did some great things. He had a perfect passer rating in his last game at Miami. The potential and ability is there.”
He’s 100 percent right.
But saying it is wrong on so many levels.
First of all, of course he was inconsistent. He should never have started immediately. He was a major project. The guy had to learn how to play under center after operating out of shotgun at West Virginia. And when you operate primarily out of shotgun, it means you also need a lot of work on your footwork – different drops.
Yes David, he was inconsistent, but what the heck did you guys expect? He was thrown to the wolves.
Of course he was “up and down.” He was rushed – big-time.
John Idzik made a mistake.
He picked a project in the second round, a player who was far from a slam-dunk NFL QB prospect, and he hitched his wagon to him.
Two years later, Idzik is gone.
I refuse to blame Geno for Idzik getting fired.
I blame Idzik for hitching his wagon to a kid who needed to sit for a couple of year, to be brought along slowly, to wean him off the funky offense he played in college.
That was a huge mistake.
It showed poor instincts from the former GM.
But this Lee thing is just flat-out wrong.
After offering no candor to Jets writers for two years about Smith, why did Lee all of sudden decide to offer a frank assessment of the quarterback?
Clearly he’s trying to cover his butt.
He’s got this reputation as a very good QB coach, and on the surface, it doesn’t look like he did a great job with Geno.
“He was trying to keep his resume clean and try to help out Rex,” said one long-time Jets beat writer. “It was equivalent of what Bruce Coslet’s ‘what did you want for me, I don’t have a quarterback.’
“He’s taking heat off Rex and himself. I thought it was gutless. I didn’t like that. I’m out the door and now I’ll throw guy under the bus.”
Look, if you want to say about a veteran QB, let’s say like Matt Stafford, that his inconsistency hurt the team – fine. But to say that about a QB who was forced to start his first two years in the league, before he was ready, is like killing your parents and then crying about being an orphan.
January 27, 2015
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