Black Monday played out for the Jets like an inescapable two-year old prophecy cashing in. The franchise was shoved onto the doomed path that led to Monday’s firings by its owner, corporate heir Woody Johnson, when after the 2012 season he fired GM Ben Tannenbaum and kept Rex Ryan as his head coach — not only kept, but with the dubious, nonnegotiable stipulation that the new GM would be tethered to Rex, a coach the new hire would have never worked with, never known. This demand — impractical, absurd, and confidently made by Johnson — along with the team’s fledgling quarterbacks and the salary cap inferno leftover by Tannenbaum — guaranteed a dearth of high-tier candidates in the interview room.
Enter John Idzik.
Idzik came to the Jets after serving as Assistant GM for the Seahawks, partly in charge of navigating the salary cap and negotiating player contracts. He was a budget man, whose credentials in areas of player development, scouting, and drafting were noticeably hypothetical. He was brought in to help Johnson — fabulously rich by means of heritage and luck and not by means of being a qualified businessperson — correct the books. He, Johnson, was essentially faced with two dilemmas — a decimated roster of amateurs and a franchise of weakening financial means — and because the position to head his front office was so unattractive, he couldn’t have a guy strong enough to fix both the roster and the business. He chose a guy who could fix the business.
“Fix the Business” in professional sports vernacular means essentially to stop spending money, and that’s exactly what Idzik did. Of course, it’s possible to spend less money and better the roster with short-term contracts with efficient but unglamorous players, but that requires a degree of scouting and personnel sense that Idzik hasn’t yet acquired. In his first offseason, Bart Scott, Eric Smith, Jason Smith, and Sione Pouha were all gone; brought in were the likes of Mike Goodson (arrested before camp; never played a snap), David Gerrard (injured both at the time he was signed, and during his entire stint with the team, before retiring), and Willie Colon (aptly named).
In the biggest and most heavily covered move of his first offseason as a general manager, Idzik traded the best player on an already scorched-earth roster, sending a future Hall of Famer, in his prime, to Tampa for a draft pick. The story behind this move is stratified and well-told, and now that Idzik’s gone and Revis is leading a defensive resurgence in New England, it’s reduced to one small proof of the front office’s overall failures during the latter half of Tannenbaum’s reign and the whole of Idzik’s — talent was lost and never replaced. Tannenbaum spent money recklessly; Idzik never spent it at all. And behind the scenes, Woody Johnson, as he all but admitted in Monday’s press conference, was blundering and confused.
Perhaps the most remarkable part of the mismatched Idzik – Ryan tenure was that it even lasted two years. At the end of the 2013 season, we all saw video footage of Woody Johnson proving to the world, if we didn’t already know, that when confronted with levelheaded reasoning when making decisions relating to football and the team that he owns, his finger is well off the pulse, his head in another galaxy. The 2013 Jets were 6-8, with a rookie quarterback, drafted by Idzik, who looked stupendously confounded, before rattling off a trivial two-game winning streak in meaningless games to reach 8-8. The scene in the locker room after their Week 17 win was of utter jubilation. Understanding football fans watched in shocked incredulity as Woody Johnson raised his arms and exulted in the return of his beloved head coach for the coming 2014 campaign.
The value placed in those final two wins was deranged and inexplicable, and it guaranteed the foul result that we saw this season. Woody Johnson ignored the dumpster fire reality that was the 2013 Jets, looked instead at the 8-8 record, but couldn’t understand how improbably those 8 wins were attained (two meaningless wins at the end of the season, a Week 1 win against Tampa gifted by a phantom personal foul, a win against New England caused by a previously never-called penalty on a field goal, etc), was never made to realize that those 8 wins could never be duplicated and that he was overseeing what was in actuality a 3-4 win team, and decided that everything was working exactly according to plan. Flash-forward to 2014: Geno again proving himself incompetent. Idzik again fielding a team that no one, including a (good, not great) coach like Ryan could win with, and you get the 4 win result that the Jets deserved in 2013.
While the course toward this failure was set by Woody Johnson’s ineptitude, Idzik and Ryan still had to go. Idzik had to go because he’s an abominable general manager, and Ryan had to go, in part, because you can’t attract a GM capable of producing the overhaul the Jets need if he’s strapped to a below .500 coach that isn’t even of his choosing. The franchise is in need of complete reconstruction, and while it’s true that the staff currently in place needs to be recycled, it’s also clear that once Woody, with the consultation of Charley Casserly and Ron Wolf, hires reliable top-level management, he needs to step far, far back into the recesses of his bewilderment. The corrupting miasma that has been pouring from the owners’ room has to be cut off — for the Jets to both win and overturn its reputation as a laughingstock, that’s step one.
Parquet 