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The Athletic’s Dianna Russini and Zack Rosenblatt, the two writers who had the story in January painting the Jets as dysfunctional last year, had yet another blockbuster about Gang Green yesterday, which puts them in a tough spot, again.
“The Jets have made WR Allen Lazard available in trade talks this offseason, league sources tell me and [Zack Rosenblatt]. Lazard is due a $10 million salary this season.” – Russini tweeted.
Russini tweeted this, but just like the story with 30 sources, she gave Rosenblatt credit as well.
When it comes to Jets scoops, and they have had many, she usually shares the credit with Rosenblatt. Now some would argue it’s challenging for two people to get the same scoops at the same time, but it’s become commonplace for insiders to share credit on stories. You see it all the time with the NFL Network gang.
Why they do that, we can get into that at another time, but some would argue it’s certainly good for more people’s job security.
But you know what is interesting about this scoop, is that it’s being ignored by most of the team’s beatwriters.
You would think that if a team was shopping a player they gave a huge contract a year ago, and is a good friend of the star QB, it would be big news on the beat.
But crickets with most beat writers.
However, one beat-writer, who has become a star on the beat, and could be on his way to a national job because he’s so dominant, Connor Hughes, did respond to this story on X (Twitter).
“While Jets WR Allen Lazard’s name came up in trade discussion, the team is not actively shopping him, sources say,” Hughes tweeted.
So the semantics are important to consider here.
It’s one thing for names to come up in discussions with other teams. It’s another thing to be actively shopping a player.
In a perfect world, Lazard probably needs a change of scenery, but who is going to take on his profligate contract?
But the well has been poisoned here, like it often gets with receivers playing on teams with QB issues.
The media and fans attack the player for lower numbers, but as Santonio Holmes once famously said with the Jets when his numbers were down, “What do you want me to throw to myself?”
Lazard was a secondary option last year on a team with a young one-read QB starting most of the year, and then he was followed by guy who also was a one-read QB. The veteran QB at the end of the season was a little better at going through progressions, but at that point, Lazard was in the witness protection program, either being made inactive or hardly playing.
This idea that Lazard had myriad drops last year, I must have been watching different games.
There were a few, no doubt, but Garrett Wilson also had a few. They all have a few. Sometimes these analytics sites, that so many reporters and fans hang their hat on, are a little too hard in grading drops, and we don’t even know who’s doing the grading. It could be some guy in his basement in Sheboygan.
But because the fans and media turned on this guy, and the team didn’t really support him much, and actually benched him for a bit, feeding the narrative, it snowballed to the point where there is so much negativity now, in a perfect world he should probably try to get out of here.
And then Lazard, clearly tired of being scapegoated, kind of fired back, saying, the team was “outschemed” after a 30-0 loss to Miami late in the year.
That was certainly accurate in that particular contest, but do you think coaches wanted to hear that? So you hardly saw the guy after that.
The biggest problem for Lazard last year was Aaron Rodgers getting hurt in the opener. Rodgers, who played with Lazard in Green Bay, knows how to use the 6-5, 227-pound receiver on fades and 50-50 balls. The other QBs didn’t.
The only guy who can save this is Rodgers. Not just by utilizing the receiver the right way, but also by making strong statements to the press supporting his guy, and telling reporters and fans to “knock it off – this guy is a good player.”
But in this fantasy football world, it might be too late.
Ironically, some people are saying and writing that the Jets should bring back Corey Davis who unretired this week, but didn’t a lot of fans and reporters turn on him for limited production (with substandard QBs) while with the Jets?
This happens a lot.
March 15, 2024
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