Content available exclusively for subscribers
I want to make this clear. I never call for firings of executives, coaches and players, but I think an important point needs to be made, and I touched on this a little on Monday night.
If you are going to hire a rookie head coach, who has never done the job before, you might want to open the bank vault and hire an all-star team of coordinators, kind of like a power four college program would.
There should be no budget issues at all.
I have no idea if the purse strings were pulled in when hiring the coordinators. I don’t have access to the Jets’ spreadsheets, but it might have been great for Glenn to have all-star coordinators. The current guys could turn out to be fine. But some might argue to let the alpha dog head coach focus on leadership, and let all-star coordinators do their thing.
In the future, you could argue that it would be best for Woody and Christopher to back up the Brinks truck for coordinators when hiring a first-time coach.
Ira needs to push for this. Ira is the brilliant man who manages the Johnsons’ money. And when I saw “brilliant,” I’m not being sarcastic. The man is brilliant.
Perhaps you need to cut other things for budget reasons, but the coaching budget should be through the proverbial financial roof.
At this point, as Glenn is learning the why’s and wherefore’s of being an NFL head coach, you wonder if the fact that two coordinators are doing their NFL jobs for the first time and trying to figure things out themselves in their respective jobs, and the third coordinator, who is a good man, was fired after one year as a DC and one year as a HC, elsewhere in recent years, and is perhaps better served in the assistant head coach job role, you wonder if that dynamic is not buttressing Glenn as much as he needs . . .
Another thing not buttressing Glenn as much as he needs was his decision, along with Darren Mougey and whoever the contract negotiator was, to give Justin Fields a two-year, $40 million deal for $30 million.
That largesse of that deal shocked some people.
What would have been a more resume-appropriate deal?
How about Jameis Winston’s deal with the Giants – a 2-year deal for $8 million with $5.3 million guaranteed.
I’m not being a wise guy.
I’m being dead serious.
Is Fields better than Winston? Obviously, a better runner, but not better in any other way, and Fields was signed to play quarterback, not running back.
Winston is 36-51 as an NFL starter, and when the Jets signed Fields, he was 14-30, and now he’s 14-33.
That contract was profligate, and while Fields is a warrior who gives you everything he’s got, he’s not great at going through progressions. He tends to lock on his first read and is often a one-read-and-run QB. He generally doesn’t throw with anticipation, waiting for receivers to flash open, then throwing rockets, sometimes late.
But it’s unfair to criticize Fields for those shortcomings because they were all over the film from his first four years. Caveat emptor.
September 30, 2025
Premium will return by 9:30 pm (or sooner) on Wednesday.
