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It kind of showed you how wasteful . . .
. . . some of the spending was.
The Jets beat Miami yesterday without many of their big ticket players.
And they somehow still managed to win the game.
Granted Miami isn’t very good, but the Dolphins have won some games.
Without Le’Veon Bell, C.J. Mosley, Trumaine Johnson and Ryan Kalil, there was no downgrade at any of their positions.
It kind of shows you that the Jets overpaid for all of them.
The profligate spending on Bell, Mosley and Johnson were the fault of Mike Maccagnan, and the frivolous Kalil signing is on Joe Douglas, Adam Gase and perhaps a very small part some in the media, who lobbied for months for the Jets to replace Jon Harrison.
I’m not saying Harrison is Kevin Mawae, but he is solid.
Remember when Ian Rapoport announced that Adam Gase believed the team’s former GM overpaid for Bell. Well, whoever leaked that to Rapoport is a total sleeze who lacked integrity, but Gase was right.
And you that yesterday against Miami, Bilal Powell, who is making $930,000 this year, might have been a slight upgrade from what we mostly have seen from Bell, who got $35 million guaranteed in what is essentially a two-year contract.
Rapoport also announced, via a sleazebag leaker, that Gase believed that Mosley was overpaid. Gase was right about this one also. To give an ILB a five-year deal for $85 million with $51 million guaranteed is borderline insanity.
Yesterday, James Burgess filling in for Mosley, finished with 13 tackles, along some other nice plays. He will make $379,410 this season according to the Spotrac website which details NFL contracts.
I’m not saying Burgess is as a good at Mosley, but it’s not a big drop-off as we saw yesterday.
And for those who might say, “Who knew that Mosley was going to get hurt,” I would say that he’s a 27-year-old linebacker with a ton of wear-and-tear from high school to Alabama to five years in Baltimore. I’m not saying you don’t sign him because of the wear-and-tear, but no way you give a player who has played so much football, at one of sports most physically demanding positions, $51 million guaranteed.
Speaking of being careful with contracts due to wear-and-tear, that brings us to another over-the-top contract given out by Maccagnan, and that was too the oft-injured Quincy Enunwa late last season. And at the time, he wasn’t healthy, dealing with a severe high ankle sprain.
Granted, he ended up re-injuring his neck, but still the poor guy has had one injury after the other, so why would you give him an injury-prone receiver, with a surgical neck, a four-year deal for $36 million with $20 million guaranteed? Good for Quincy and his family, but not good business by the former GM.
And he’s another guy they clearly didn’t miss in the Miami game.
Obviously the Jets need to stop spending like drunken sailors in free agency, like the Johnson deal, which paid a middling cornerback $34 million guaranteed.
Yes they need to spend money in free agency, but stop overpaying left and right.
December 9 2019
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