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Look, this isn’t about winning press conferences but winning championships, but the last few Joe Douglas press conferences have not been great.
And I don’t blame him. I will get to that in a minute.
The press conference at the combine was very mundane, not a lot of juice, like the one after the season and mid-season.
Douglas was asked about Dion Dawkins trashing the Jets and Michael Clemons (who he called “Bitch Boy”), and the GM responded: “Respect has to be earned, it has to be taken,” Douglas said. “There is really nothing to say, words are meaningless. Well done is better than well said. We obviously have to earn people’s respect.”
Some would argue calling somebody “Bitch boy” and some of the other stuff that Dawkins said had Clemons and the Jets, go beyond whether the team is winning or not, and perhaps needed a little more push-back from the GM publicly.
Some would argue Douglas’ response was just right.
Douglas was asked about his assistant GM Rex Hogan leaving the organization recently:
“Rex is outstanding,’ Douglas said. “The discussion with him is there’s going to be opportunities for him moving forward to explore those opportunities and I’m going to do everything I can to help him reach those opportunities.”
If he’s “outstanding,” why would you let him leave three months before the draft? Very unusual for a personnel executive so involved in the draft to leave 3/4 of the way through the draft prep?
And where are those “opportunities?”
A lot of new staffs were filled over the last month around the league with new regimes taking over.
There is something missing from this story, but nobody pushed Douglas on it, perhaps for obvious reasons.
Some are assuming that the former executive was talking too much, and if that is true, and some of them benefitted from it, why would they push the GM on something they might have been in on it?
But the problem with this press conference, just like the last two, is the lack of follow-up questions on topics.
Some of the best answers come on follow-up questions, and you don’t see a lot of those anymore.
Why?
Well, first of all, everybody is tweeting up a storm during press conferences, and if you are feverishly tweeting stuff about the prior answer you are ill-equipped to jump in with a follow-up question, Your mind is preoccupied typing a tweet.
Secondly, a lot of people in the media have become really soft, and don’t want to ruffle feathers. Follow-up questions, pressing people with tough follow-up questions to some answer that needed them, can piss people off. Believe me, I know from first-hand experience.
One way to get things, and I’m not talking about from Douiglas, but in general, is to be nice to the people you cover, never push them on anything, and you get rewarded at times for your milquetoast approach.
Somebody who was involved with a recent story with 30 sources around the Jets, a co-author if that story, really never asks tough questions. Perhaps that is by design playing the long game.
But once again, these last few press conferences from Joe Douglas, bye-week, season ending and the combine, were not particularly compelling, but I don’t blame the GM.
February 29, 2024
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