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Remember that famous line
from the movie “Cool Hand Luke.”
“What we have here is a failure to communicate.”
That was certainly an issue for the Jets with some of their prior GM/head coach combinations, like John Idzik/Rex Ryan, Mike Maccagnan/Todd Bowles, Maccagnan/Adam Gase and even Joe Douglas/Gase.
That last one wasn’t based on a bad relationship, but more the old corporate structure. Douglas and Gase got along by all accounts, but Douglas had no power to stop Gase from making dubious personnel decisions on game day. The old Jets corporate structure called for the GM to pick the players and roster, and for the coach to decide who plays on game day.
So Douglas could add talented young running backs like LaMical Perrine, Ty Johnson and Josh Adams, but if Gase wanted to roll with 36-year-old Frank Gore on game day, it was his right to do that, and Douglas could not say a word. And Gase just did that, perhaps to help Gore reach certain historical rushing landmarks.
But before Christopher Johnson hired Robert Saleh, he changed the corporate structure, making Douglas the football czar, and having the coach report to him.
The old system, which wasn’t working, is now gone.
Perhaps that old system could work if the head coach and GM were in lockstep and communicated well, but neither was the case with tandems like Maccagnan/Bowles. It’s hard to communicate well when you aren’t speaking to each other, which was the case with those two for a stretch of time.
However, while Douglas is the football czar, he’s not an tyrant, who is going to force players on Saleh he doesn’t want.
One of the keys to a Jets off-season, what seemed fruitful from a player personnel standpoint, was tremendous communication between Douglas and Saleh through free agency and the draft process.
“When you communicate to the level we communicated, it eliminates the risk in terms of taking players, and I thought the process we went through, and the scenarios that were created, and the leadership that Joe provided through this whole process, was second to none, and because of it, we are all excited about what we were able to achieve up to this point,” Saleh said.
This communication led to the selections of a quarterback and offensive guard in the first-round who are perfect system fits for the offense Saleh’s offensive coordinator Mike LaFleur is installing.
And then fast forward to later in the draft, the picks of college safeties, Hamsah Nasirildeen and Jamien Sherwood, were driven by Saleh’s philosophy of taking large college safeties and moving them to linebacker.
Look, I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself in the praise of the Jets’ new tag team of Douglas and Saleh, because ultimately, they need to win games. They will be judged by their won-loss record over time, and no games have yet to take place for Gang Green with these two lording over their football operation.
But the level of communication and synchronization, between these two men, during the team’s off-season, is the kind of GM/head coach dynamic the Jets have been lacking in recent year, and it hurt their results on the field.
June 30, 2021
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