jets

Turbulence Ongoing: An Open Letter to Fireman Ed in a Difficult Time

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fireman-ed

Dearest sweet innocent Fireman Edward,

How you doing, buddy? This is a rhetorical question asked in halfhearted politeness, as I initiate this correspondence reasonably aware that you have spent these recent months weeping soulfully into the bucket of your upturned fireman’s hat while your inbox fills with messages from bovine Pats fans urging you not to feel ashamed at displaying your pathetic emotion in some sick public exhibition for their own fetishist delight. Do not allow them to see your snot-bubbly despair and become sexually aroused. Ignore their perverted agitations; treat yourself lightly. You’re merely reacting in the nature of your trade — by draining the giant fire hydrant inside of your face.

The roller coaster of emotions that most Jets fans have embarked upon this offseason began in the morose basement of their weathered psyches, and you are of course no different. Your team’s improbable loss in Buffalo halted a run toward the playoffs that, once there, could have conceivably carried them deep into a vulnerable AFC bracket. From the depths of your sorrow, Fireman Ed, may your spirit be enlivened by one mollifying truth: even in missing a postseason opportunity placed at Week 17 within easy grasp, the Jets had a Great Season.

Fitzpatrick had a tremendous outlier campaign. Marshall broke receiving records. Decker caught something like every third down pass thrown in his vicinity. Pryor tackled people really hard and Ivory, though now departed, ran his way to the upper crust of mediocrity. A new head coach won ten games when seven or eight would have been satisfactorily received.

Remember it all fondly. Once you’ve fortified yourself in a cocoon of alacritous nostalgia, may you find the strength to look toward 2016 with honest discernment, and let your heart then fill with dread.

When it comes – and it’s already aboard the urine-stinking express from Secaucus – regression will take your joyous retrospective sentiment and destroy it with dynamite. The most reliable indicator of a backwards step in year-to-year win total is a high number of close wins whose outcome could realistically have been less favorable – games won that could’ve easily been lost. The 2015 Jets didn’t raise a red flag in this category – six of their ten wins were by a double-digit margin – but the schedule they so dominated was roughly as challenging as finding an unsettlingly shaped tan line in Pensacola. Only two of their ten wins were against playoff teams (the Patriots and a Redskins team that benefited from the dumpster fire in the NFC East), and among their six losses were four against teams who themselves fell short of a postseason birth.

What I’m saying to you Ed is save the game tape from those thrilling victories against the Browns and Jaguars — pull them out while you’re amidst next year’s gauntlet. The Jets will face seven of this year’s playoff teams in 2016 – more than triple the postseason-caliber strength of this year’s schedule. This season had a difficult ending, but don’t ever forget that it also had hope – and next year when the Jets are in Arizona, you may not want to watch the game live. Maybe instead pull up the DVR of this year’s Titans game and reminisce.

As the Jets’ front office plays the most depressing game of free agent chicken of this offseason with Ryan Fitzpatrick – and as Fitzpatrick employs the Stephen Drew Free Agency Strategy of Incomprehensible Self Worth, while your brethren in the fandom wring their hands – know this well: Ryan Fitzpatrick will never be as good as he was in 2015, and in 2015 against a pitiful slate of opponents Ryan Fitzpatrick did not take his team to the playoffs. He self destructed in the season’s pivotal game, as you knew, in the cockles of your heart, that he would. The Jets have roughly $20 million available under the cap to fool with this offseason – if you think giving $14 million of it to Ryan Fitzpatrick better equips you to win a Super Bowl against that comparatively stellar 2016 schedule and those beyond, I think you’re dead wrong.

And that’s where I lose you, Ed, I know, because you can’t win in this league without a quarterback and Ryan Fitzpatrick is the best one out there, and you know him, and you like him, and he just almost did it for you. But here’s the reality you face, one that no one in New York City ever can: Your team will not contend for the playoffs. With or without Ryan Fitzpatrick, it doesn’t matter. You’re not winning next year. Bring him back if it’s reasonable, but don’t be duped in your hangover into letting him outsell his worth and disallow you from enhancing your roster elsewhere.

Don’t spend 70% of your spending cash on a quarterback who’s had one winning season in ten, whose career record is 43-61. Understand that big contracts to the likes of Brock Osweiller and Brian Hoyer do not necessarily mean that the market for middling quarterbacks is by rule becoming more expensive – so far it still means that teams who overpay for middling talent lose. When Ryan Fitzpatrick professes his worth, remember your aging secondary and offensive line, that your best receiver is also coming off an outlier season unlikely to be duplicated, and that at some point in the next 18 months you’ll need resources to fill those holes and you’ll still have to find and pay an actual franchise quarterback.

As you judge your team’s offseason, keep hold in your gloom to sober rationality: 2015 was great, and no matter what, 2016 will hurt.

 

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Grounded, With Cause

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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.