We all understand the way the CBA leads to the way rookies and others on their first contracts are paid can yield effective players who do not count much against the draft. But every team is alloted draft picks, and tries to get the most value they can for them. Meanwhile teams have varying needs at certain positions, and when pursuing a BPA or even modified BPA strategy in the draft, key holes may not be easily filled by that route. Another factor is that rookies tend to be relatively unproven commodities compared to vets with proven track records. Those who are successful and go into FA cost money, but this is just another example of you get what you pay for. every team has a scouting department that does their best to draft players. It's not like Idzik has some advantage there over other teams. The net result of these considerations is that this whole mantra of building through the draft is too simple to explain what is really necessary to succeed.
How about Jet fans make MetLife as hard to play in as Qwest field? Just might lead to an extra win or two
The Jets let most of those players go when their primes were up. It's not like we kept Thomas Jones, Faneca, Woody or Jenkins too long. The Jets collapsed because they drafted poorly and missed on a quarterback. The Jets blew their drafts in 08, 09 and 10. You can keep your young players if they actually play well. If Kyle Wilson could turn his head around, he might be a starter for us right now. Vlad Duccasse is gone. Stephen Hill may get cut. Had we drafted well, the transition from the 09/10 free agent based team would have been fine. Take a look at those years from 2008 - 2011. http://www.pro-football-reference.com/teams/nyj/draft.htm The one thing that seems to matter most to get your team to the playoffs every year nowadays is a star QB. While everyone is admiring the Seattle model, it will be interesting to see how long they can win with defense and the run game in today's NFL.
The reason that over-committing to the vet FA's and vet trades was a problem was that it masked the poor drafting that was happening around those moves. This was true in the early 00's and it was true in the late 00's, two completely different attempts using largely the same formula to try to build the team. In both cases the people running the Jets drafts should have been fired for ineptitude but instead Woody Johnson spent a lot of money to try to right the ship. As you point out, if the Jets had drafted just a bit better in either sequence they'd have gotten over the top. The draft was holding the Jets back and that fact was covered up by the owner's willingness to go all-in on free agents to try to get over the top. That's why the Jets of both mini-eras were a contender but never a first class team. The secondary factor was that when you are spending that amount of cash on veteran free agents you are both raising the expectations of your younger players, who might well choose to rebuff reasonable long-term offers as a result, and you are depriving your developmental players of the field time necessary to fully develop.
Dimitri Patterson is a one year attempt to fix CB for one year. He's 31 years old. The Jets had no reason to believe that he was anything more than a quick fix. The guys listed above were all guys in the early to mid-prime of their career whom the Jets signed for a multi-year period in the hopes they'd be a player for them over three plus years.
Brad, I feel I must point out by way of clarification that I felt you implied before that the focus under Tanny on FA was what hurt the team, while here I think you are conceding the previous point that it was really poor drafting that was the problem from 08 til 11 or 12, depending. So what is the connection between poor drafting and focusing on FA? Was it that the FA focus is to some extent a public relations move to change the focus of fans away from poor drafts? Was it that the focus on FA was done when Woody and whoever should have been focusing on fixing the scouting and drafting decisions instead? Or was it some other connection or cause and effect?
Here, fair enough distinguishing Patterson from a player like Donnie Abraham. But i wished you had addressed Nagle's point about Revis. Methinks you might be troubled still by the fact that an organization like the Pats that has the general reputation of being well run went and signed a Cb for $12 mil a year on effectively a one year deal.
I'm not at all troubled by Revis being on the Pats. The combo that was very effective in disrupting games was Revis and Rex's blitzing. He's never been a big impact player in any other system. This is not because he's not a great player, because he is, it's because CB is not an impact position in terms of wins and losses at the NFL level. Ask yourself why the great CB's, the Hall of Famers, who have played over the last decade have one super bowl win (Charles Woodson w/Packers) to show for it. It wasn't even a great year for Woodson when they won it. His great years sandwiched the win in 2009 and 2011. Darrelle Revis had about the best year a CB has ever had in the NFL in 2009. It's too bad he could only cover one guy at the end and the Colts had X + 1 receivers who could catch and run that year. Same thing will be true this year in New England unless Belichik throws the kitchen sink at the opposing QB while putting Revis on the other team's best receiver and counting on the QB to go to his best option when he has no time to think through the consequences.
Wasn't directed at me, but I think the FA is another way to fix problems when the draft isn't working. The downside in FA (especially with the rookie contracts) is that a mistake in FA hits you with a roster spot and cap number where the draft pick only hits you with the roster spot. The Jets tried to build a competitive team with bad drafts and FA. They did build a competitive team in 09 and 10, but then the team crumbled because of the strategy used. It crumbled for many reasons, but if we just focus on draft and FA those are two key areas where we can dig deeper. a) The FA aspect is interesting because we signed Holmes and Cro to large contracts in which both players did not live up to. We also signed older players like Braylon and LT and what not who we couldn't replace. Let's also include trades in here, we also used picks to get players like Kris Jenkins and what not. That left the team as older and in hindsight all on the downswing of their careers. Also resigning Sanchez before it was necessary was a poor move. That isn't necessarily a problem by itself but combine it with b) WE missed on draft picks and we traded up to get those players. WE traded up for Sanchez and Greene, neither ended up being top 10 in their position and Slauson was also in that 2009 draft. Looking back now, wow we messed up this draft. We created a hole in FA by knowingly signing Favre to a 1 year deal and not having a young QB we liked ready to take over. That led us to HAVING to get a QB in the draft. The following year we got Wilson and Vlad early if I remember correctly. Again, no top 10 players, no immediate impact, no great help to the team. So the two fold connection was that we spent on these FA that couldn't perform 3-5 years at a high level for their contracts and on top of that, we just didn't have the players to replace them. We also overestimated our talent (in my opinion) after 2010 season because of how far the team went. We thought as a franchise Sanchez was ready to take the next step and be like Ryan, Stafford, Rivers type QB where without the pieces he can be effective, but with pieces he is a top 7 QB. Instead we learned he was more like a Flacco, Dalton, Eli type where with the right pieces he's a top 15 QB and without them, well you wonder how much longer you are paying him that money. I feel like you weren't looking for this response and not from me, but I like going over the Tanny/Sanchez/Rex era because it's very interesting. What always gets overlooked is that Tanny was able to build a great team, what he struggled to do was keep that team great and that ultimately what led the Jets organization looking for a new GM.
Yes, I also hope that Revis focuses on a player that isn't even on the team, and runs around looking for that player for the entire game. Good call.
All the Geno homers tell me not to worry. Pretty soon I'll be looking like Alfred E Newman. No insurance cept for Vick. Manziel, Garrapolo, Bridgewater all by the wayside. What's going to happen when Geno has to heave one downfield and he's not at WVU. Lol
The point about the connection between FA and the draft picks not panning out is that there is none. The closest you came to identifying, meaning attempting to identify, a connection was in saying getting Favre for one year left the Jets with a hole at Qb that they had to fill the next year, which they attempted to do with the Sanchez pick. But imo the hole was there anyway, and only temporarily filled by Favre. Pennington had many fans still coming off the 08 season. But the FO had lost confidence in his ability to stay on the field, and they were right. His one year success in Miami did not prove the opposite. In fact signing Favre was such a big move that it mostly silenced what objections the Chad Fans would have otherwise made quite a ruckus with, no doubt about it. It was a smart move, and if Favre had not gotten hurt down the stretch, the Jets would probably have done a lot of damage in the playoffs that year. Nothing about having Favre made it necesary that the Jets later found Sanchez to be unsatisfactory. The need to try again to get a franchise Qb in the 09 draft came because of Chad being too often injured, not because the Jets got Favre in FA.
