Will this work?

Back to Joe Douglas . . .

In Joe Douglas’ meeting with beat reporters after his brief TV press conference, he was asked this important question:

Rich Cimini – ESPN: Joe, even though as the GM you will have control over the 53 and will have the final say, how much input will you take from Adam (Gase)? Could the lines get blurred there at all?

Douglas: That’s a great question. Just because there is control of the 53 doesn’t mean there isn’t going to be strong collaboration. How it worked in Philadelphia, that was the model, also in Baltimore and Chicago, there was collaboration with not only the head coach, but every position coach and the entire personnel staff. We are going to get together and have discussions about players and we will find the best players for the New York Jets.

I don’t believe for a second that Gase “just wants to to coach the team” as some claim.

Clearly he has a great deal of interest in which players are on his team, and he had final say in Miami.

If just wanted to coach the team, and didn’t need control of his roster, why did he get that in his Miami deal?

But with that being said, I think Gase and Douglas will work fine together. Why? Because Douglas has immense respect for Douglas as a personnel evualator.

“His evaluation skills are unbelievable,” Gase said on Tuesday.

Look, I like Mike Maccagnan personally, and he made some good moves for the Jets (Henry Anderson, Quinnen Williams, Sam Darnold, Chris Herndon, Jamal Adams and Leonard Williams), but I don’t think Gase respected him that much, or at least not nearly as much as he respects Douglas.

Gase and Douglas became close the year they worked together in Chicago. Maybe with Gase on the cusp of becoming a head coach at the time, and Douglas close to becoming a GM, they figured they could team up some day. Surely, that conversation came up.

I mentioned several times teaming Gase with a stranger like George Paton or Scott Fitterer would have been a big mistake. For somebody Gase doesn’t know telling him who his players will be is recipe for disaster. That is kind of what was going on with Maccagnan. Of course, Gase knew Macccagnan from the interview process, but that is about it. And clearly when he started to work with Mike, he didn’t like the partnership. He reportedly felt Mike dragged his feet on decisions too often.

Douglas is a great communicator and alpha dog who will work very hard on making consensus decisions by talking to coaches, scouts and so forth.

He also has a presence that commands a room.

Gase joked the other day that the 6-2, 300-pound Douglas could “kick his butt.”

While we don’t see that happening, that is a very small part of this.

Douglas has an intimidating presence in a good way – he’s a massive powerful man with a powerful personality.

Of course there will be some disagreements. How could there not be, especially when you cut down from 90 to 53? That is a lot players to make decisions on in a short period of time.

But I think Gase has so much respect for Douglas that he won’t resent Joe having control of the roster.

At least not nearly as much as he did with Maccagnan, or if a total stranger entered the picture.

June 14, 2019

Premium will return by 9:30 pm on Monday.