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Mike Maccagnan is gone. Let’s unpack this . . .
As you all know Maccagnan was fired today as Jets GM. The announcement was made by ESPN’s Adam Schefter and Jeff Darlington. I highly recommend following Darlington on Twitter (@JeffDarlington) for all things Gase.
When the rumors came out about Mike Maccagnan and Adam Gase not getting a long (hat tip draft analyst @TonyPauline), the first thing that popped into my mind, and I told this to some close friends, is that this is the beginning of a bloodless coup by Gase to get his own GM.
From a Machiavellianian standpoint, Gase played this perfectly. Tell them you can get along with the incumbent GM, get a huge long-term deal, and then fight with the GM, make the owner uncomfortable with the discord, and force him to make a move. Who will be the first one to go, the GM with two years left on his deal, or the coach who just signed a long-term deal that the ink hasn’t dried on yet?
But my thinking was, and I wrote this in the latest issue of JC, that the coup would be completed after the season if the Jets had a bad record this year.
I didn’t expect it this soon.
When Gase repeatedly said over the last few months, including at his introductory presser, that having final say didn’t matter to him, I didn’t buy it.
He had final say in Miami, so how on earth would be comfortable not having it with the Jets?
But the timing of the announcement by Schefter and Darlington was bizarre.
To fire a guy who was just heavily involved in hiring the new coach, spent a fortune of the owner’s money in free agency and made the draft picks, including the third overall selection, is Kabuki Theater, bizarro.
Look, I understand firing scouts after the draft, it happens all the time. You wait until after the draft because they spent the whole year scouting players, so you don’t want to send them packing before you use all that info.
But Maccagnan the recent important decisions he was involved in goes way beyond just stacking a draft board.
Obviously a huge sticking point between the GM and coach was not only the largesse of the Le’Veon Bell contract (Ian Rapoport announced this annoyed Gase), but the fact that Bell is blowing off the off-season program. Gase can talk about it being “voluntary,” but he’s clearly pissed that the centerpiece of his offense isn’t in town for the off-season install of his playbook.
Remember what Gase said the other day. I wrote a column about it.
“The front office, we are on the same page – both of us are trying to get the same kind of guys, the kind of guys that are looking to win, do it right, be here to learn the offense, defense, special teams, all those type of things,” Gase said on Friday.
So he wants his players to “be here to learn the offense, defense, special teams.”
And we all know now they weren’t “on the same page.”
Gase pulled off the coup d’état with aplomb.
Christopher Johnson said that this wasn’t Gase winning a power struggle, and he made this decision on his own.
But as I tweeted before, “Christopher Johnson said that Adam Gase had nothing to do with the decision to fire the GM, but if Gase was fighting with the GM, with the owner around the team (more), didn’t he have something to do with the decision?”
Bottom line – Gase won the battle.
I just thought it would happen after the season (if they had a bad record), not now.
May 15, 2019
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