The sad thing is that the vast majority of us saw that Geno wasn't the best available option by week 5 or so.
Actually not quite then. Geno was doing just enough to lose, which made some (like me) think "If he can play Brady that close then he'll be able to beat worse teams!" But then a game like the Bills made it obvious.
Heh. Well I don't think Ryan is a particularly smart man by any means, But I can't say to what extent he was on board with the decisions to keep playing Smith until the season hopes were killed by him. It seems to me more the first reason, and that Ryan went along with it. But that's part of the problem with Ryan, isn't it? His lack of knowledge about the O probably means he does not carry much weight in such a big decision as who should be the starting Qb. Plus we know he was part of the whole four year travesty of how the Jets mishandled Sanchez, so there's that, too.
They probably win the bears and lions games and possibly one of the packers or bills games. Probably 4-6 or 5-5 right now if Rex knew how to manage a QB situation and play Vick. Still not a great situation but also not completely irrelevant like they are now.
Geno was costing the Jets 7+ points a game at QB. That's a huge difference. He cost them more than a TD with his performance in the win against the Raiders in the opener. Obviously the Jets had to evaluate his play and they had to factor in things like a hole at LG and all the penalties but by game 4 or 5 it was pretty obvious Geno was hurting the team and that was when you maybe decide you don't have that much invested in him and it's ok to move to Plan B. It's easy to fall in love with a prospect based on the good things that he flashes from time to time. It's much harder to coldly evaluate his overall performance and realize that he's probably not going to be an NFL player because the flashes are just flashes and he's not gaining fast enough in his overall game to make them worth anything. Sometimes you just have no hope because you are so invested in a guy that you have to hang on by your fingernails and pray he comes through. The Jets aren't in that situation with Geno. If he's going to get back on the field he's going to have to do it by being a clearly superior player and his opportunities to do that are now limited.
To be fair I don't believe Geno Smith's Jets career is necessarily over. It could very well be but this also just might be a big bump in the road. You bring in a QB-friendly Offensive Mind HC next year, a fresh start, an emphasis on protecting the football and he could still develop. I also think if he was in a different system it might help. But like you said- they aren't in a situation where they have to be so invested, live or die by him. They never were but they certainly acted like it for too long and that's why they are in the place they are in now. The HC could've benched him at any point and it wouldn't mean anything beyond that upcoming game, for the Jets or Geno Smith's long term prospects. But there was both a loyalty and/or a disillusion regarding his play that lead the HC to keep him in too long.
Geno's future with the Jets is highly in question nor do I believe they will ever go back to him. New coach is going to want his own quarterback, to me that doesn't look to be Geno Smith. He will remain here on a backup basis, but once this season ends - more than likely is the last time we ever see Geno Smith starting a game. He's not an NFL QB.
Pryor was our shiny new draft pick from this year. I can get starting him as long as we did (although we could have benched him a week or two earlier). Smith is another story. The last four games last year were all against weak opponents. Yet all too many chalked up Geno playing well against weak teams as improvement. When you are only good for 200 yards of offense per game, throwing a pick six is writing a check you just can't cash. Not only should Vick have been our starter since game one but Geno should have at the very least been benched for a game or two after our 1-3 start.
In order for Geno to be good in the NFL at this point the Jets need superior players around him and they need for him to somehow forget just about everything he's learned so far and start over in a new system that is friendlier to his strengths and weaknesses. In retrospect the biggest hurdle Geno had to overcome when he reached the NFL was going from throwing mostly uncontested passes to the only read to making mostly contested passes in the WCO which is a multiple read offense. The most WVU asked Geno to do was a two read system where he basically just had to find the FS to know where he was throwing the ball. The WCO is a split-second timing offense. It requires a QB to make two reads on most plays and to make the decision on throwing the ball at the moment they cycle past each of the reads. Geno doesn't have that capability at this point. His ability to read isn't there yet and even when he makes the read his release isn't quick enough a lot of the time. This is one of those things that might be corrected with a thousand reps over an off-season with live players but it isn't going to get corrected by film study. Knowing what you have to do doesn't automatically give you the capability to do it.
The reason Vick did not start sooner was because of Idzik. Vick didn't get a fair chance to start during training camp because Idzik.
What to make of Smith in that four game stretch was of course the major topic in assessments of the 13 season this past off season. Like you I thought the optimists made far too much of that stretch, and overlooked the obvious facts that Smith's ypa and overall yardage went down as the CS chose to put him in conservative game plans and playcalls. It was not in short a case where the CS had an increasing confidence in his ability. Despite my skepticism I was on board enough to see if Smith might have improved enough going into this season, and there was a lot of hot air in camp that he had. But reading between the lines it was also there to be understood that Vick was not really being given a chance to win the starting job, and that fingers had to be used to tip the scales in Smith's favor. And in short order we saw there was no real improvement in Smith. Even under the "see what we have in our second round pick from the year before" scenario it took far too long for the Jets to make that switch to Vick . The season has been squandered, and imo whoever was most behind that decision, to leave Smith in there, should be shitcanned.
