Former Jets beat writer D.J. Bien-Aime, now with ESPN, was recently on “Badlands’ podcast, and relayed an interesting anecdote from the 2022 Senior Bowl.
It was about a conversation he had with former Jets defensive coordinator Jeff Ulbrich in Mobile.
“He’s in Atlanta now, I can tell this story,” Bien-Aime said. “It was me and Coz (New York Post writer Brian Costello) at the Senior Bowl, 2022, and Jeff Ulbrich, really, really, really, really wanted some corners, and said verbatim, ‘If I don’t get some corners, I’m going to get fired.'”
And Ulbrich had a request for the two beat writers:
“I want you guys to consistently push in mock drafts for us to draft a cornerback. Why? Because Woody reads that stuff,” Ulbrich said, according to Bien-Aime.
This is not the first time there has been a report that the owner can be impacted by what is written.
The following appeared in a story about the Jets in “The Athletic” in December:
“When we’re discussing things, you’d hear Woody cite something that Brick or Jack read online that’s being weighed equally against whatever opinion someone else in the department had,” said one Jets executive.
So quite obviously, if these anecdotes are accurate, this tendency needs to stop if the Jets want to take the next step as a program.
You can’t let media blogs impact personnel decisions.
They need to let Aaron Glenn and Darren Mougey make roster decisions sans the influence of outside noise.
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