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When you miss the playoffs 13 years in a row, something is amiss, and it goes beyond injuries.
All teams have injuries in the NFL.
The Cleveland Browns lost their starting QB, star running back, and are on their backup left tackle and third-string right tackle, and are currently 9-5.
Time for the overused Bill Parcells quote – “There is a way to win ever game.”
The Browns have figured out ways to win games.
The Jets, not so much.
“Culture will eat strategy for lunch,” said philosopher Peter Drucker.
The Jets culture needs some repairs.
“It’s about culture,” Jets QB Aaron Rodgers said earlier this month. “Culture can win championships, chemistry wins championships. So we obviously need to fine-tune a couple of things, tighten some things up.”
In a strong football culture, you shouldn’t keep posting players PFF grades during a losing streak, to point out whole well one player is doing, when the team as a whole is struggling.
Bad for the culture. Football is the ultimate team sport, and emphasizing what individuals are doing over the team, is not a good idea.
Plus, the coaches don’t even value the PFF grades, so if a team is putting them up to talk about how well a player is playing, it might not be a shared opinion with the football staff.
Lobbying for people to vote for your players to make the Pro Bowl on social media, during a losing streak, is bad for the culture.
Football is about the collective, not the individual.
Another cultural issue is too much focus on producing content on the back of the players.
The player’s jobs are about playing great on Sunday to help their teams win.
They aren’t meant to be content producers for Twitter and YouTube. When you ask them to be content producers too much, it takes away from their focus and is bad for the culture.
Another problem – asking players trivial questions as they are going out to the practice field to go to work.
Asking players their favorite movie or pizza topping as they walk out to the practice field to practice, are bad for the culture.
As they walk out to the field, they should be focusing on the game plan, their assignments, their technique and so forth.
Not whether pineapple is a good topping for pizza.
Look, I’m not being a hater. I’m just dealing with the reality of building a strong football culture.
And if a team has missed the playoffs 13 years in a row, a current high for all professional sports leagues, things need to change.
So in a way, I’m not being a hater – it’s the opposite.
As rocker Nick Lowe once sang, “You’ve got to be cruel to be kind.”
In other words, people who blow smoke at you, aren’t doing you any favors.
The Jets’ turnaround isn’t just about Rodgers coming back and drafting another offensive tackle.
The culture needs to be fixed.
And somebody needs to talk to somebody pretty important about their Twitter account. Maybe his brother, who is a wonderful human being can do it. Maybe Aaron can. That account is hurting the team’s culture. Not on purpose, there is no malicious intent, but somebody must talk to him about it.
December 18, 2023
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