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The Athletic probably did the Jets a favor with their latest expose on the organization.
As Judge Louis Brandeis once famously said, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
It’s pretty clear some things need to change at 1 Jets Drive if the Jets want to break their dubious streak of missing the playoffs 14 years in a row, the current high in pro sports.
The latest blockbuster The Athletic, had myriad nuggets that didn’t paint the most ideal picture of the football operation, including that Jets owner Woody Johnson has mentioned player ratings from the Madden video game in player evaluations.
According to the story, Joe Douglas had to tell Denver Browns GM George Paton that the Jets couldn’t make a trade for wide receiver Jerry Jeudy due to Johnson’s objection based on Jeudy’s “Madden NFL” number.
The story made it seem like Johnson’s teenage son, Brick, who is now a college freshman, is involved in personnel decisions.
“I answer to a teenager,” Douglas reportedly told some confidantes about his situation with the Jets before he was fired in November.
This story was authored by Dianni Russini, Michael Silver and Zak Rosenblatt.
So it’s unclear which writer got which nuggets, but the majority of the scoops likely came from Russini and Silver two seasoned NFL insiders. This isn’t a shot at Rosenblatt, just a realistic look at the background of the scribes. Russini and Silver are national writers with sources all over the league, and Rosenblatt is the young Jets’ beat writer. He probably helped the two older writers with some of the Jets details that a beat writer would be more on top of than a national person.
It should be noted that Silver is a long-time Bay Area-based NFL writer, who most recently covered the 49ers for San Francisco Chronicle. He has long been plugged into Bay Area teams, the Raiders when they were there and the 49ers. So he has some very good 49ers sources, and the Jets have some people with 49ers roots.
He was also a long-time friend of Aaron Rodgers, but the two reportedly had a falling out. They both went to Cal. I’m not saying that Rodgers was a source of this story. Not at all. Just saying he used to be close with Silver.
Silver has always been good at endearing himself to players and coaches, getting them to let their guard down and give him good information. This is an important quality for an insider, and he’s excellent at it.
So he was probably an incredible help in this story to Russini that featured the headline: ” “Woody Johnson’s Jets: ‘Madden’ ratings, a lost season and ‘the most dysfunctional place imaginable.”
Another anecdote in the story claimed that Woody Johnson would go to team football executives with ideas from reporters, like from the popular Jets website – “Jets X-Factor.”
“When we’re discussing things, you’ll hear Woody cite something that Brick or Jack (Woody’s other teenage son) read online that’s being weighed equally against whatever opinion someone else in the department has,” said one Jets executive in the Athletic story.
Choose to believe what you want from The Athletic story, but it could be a turning point for the Jets.
The current modus operandi is not working, and the public backlash from Jets fans based on the Athletic story led the team to release a statement about the Jets reportedly rejecting a Jeudy trade based on his Madden score.
“It is used as a reference point; it is not determinative,” the spokesperson said. “It’s really sad that an adult would use a misleading anecdote about teenagers to make their father look bad. It’s ridiculous, quite honestly, the idea that this was used to influence the opinion of experienced executives. (The sons) have no roles in the organization.”
So the spokesperson even admitted that a Madden score was used as a “reference point” in a personnel meeting.
Should that even happen in an NFL organization, even if that information is not “determinative?”
There clearly needs to be a sea change at 1 Jets Drive and maybe it’s already starting to happen.
Woody Johnson has not tweeted the team’s uniform colors this week, something he does every week.
In fact, he hasn’t tweeted since December 18.
Many would argue that uniform colors have nothing to do with winning.
The bottom line here is simple – The Jets need to hire a great head coach, a proven head coach, not a hot-shot coordinator with no head coaching experience., and give him the final say, like the Denver Broncos did with Sean Payton and the Los Angeles Chargers did with Jim Harbaugh.
This isn’t the time for amateur hour. They need an alpha dog leader, and Woody needs to throw him the car keys, and let him do this thing, sans meddling.
And maybe this blockbuster Athletic story, and the humiliation it perhaps caused, will be the impetus to do this.
December 20, 2024
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