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Phoenix, Arizona – If I hear one more time the Jets are rebuilding, I’m going to scream.
They aren’t rebuilding. Let me explain.
How can any owner worth his salt, let a management team (general manager and head coach), start a rebuild in the third year of their program?
That makes no sense. Zero.
To me, what Mike Maccagnan and Todd Bowles are doing is moving up the learning curve.
Both men were new to their jobs in 2015 when they took over. Neither man ever did their current job before.
They both made a number of mistakes their first two seasons, and they are fortunate to have an owner, who is willing to let them learn from them, and now get it right.
And one of the reasons the owner is probably letting them do it, is he gummed up the works, to a degree. He pushed for this management team to sign a cornerback, past his prime, to a monster contract. That was the owner’s idea, and it did significant damage to the “MacBowles” program.
I really don’t think people comprehend the damage this signing did to the team, the culture, the salary cap.
I was just writing something about the Jets’ safeties for the next issue of the magazine. And I wrote about what a good blitzer Calvin
Pryor is, but he was hardly sent last year because the cornerbacks needed double-team help. Todd Bowles loves to blitz, but hardly did it last year, and a large part of the reason was because Revis needed help.
Let’s get this straight – you are paying a cornerback $17 million guaranteed in 2016, and you can’t do what you like on defense (blitz), because your cornerback, making megabucks, constantly needs help.
That, my friends, is a dumpster fire.
Revis also wouldn’t tackle and made excuses in the media for his play – both terrible cultural problems.
So the Revis signing was a ball-and-chain around Mike and Todd’s ankles.
Now, don’t get me wrong, they both made plenty of mistakes in their first two years.
But the owner didn’t help with this disastrous signing done for the wrong reasons.
So now, Mike and Todd, have a year or two to get this right.
And to Mike’s credit, he learned from his first two off-seasons, not to spend like a drunken sailor. The contracts given out this off-season are much more measured and pragmatic. Morris Claiborne (when healthy) is better than Revis, and they got him for $5 million this year. Sounds a lot better than $17 million for a washed-up player.
We will see what Todd Bowles learned from his first two years. It’s hard to say that in an off-season when it comes to the coach. It’s easier to discern that a GM learned lessons based on his off-season work. To his credit, it looks like Bowles upgraded his coaching staff at several spots (I don’t want to name the spots and embarrass the old coaches).
But 2017 isn’t a rebuilding year. It’s a year to learn from myriad mistakes the first two years, and do things better.
March 27, 2017
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