I am not saying that these guys belong in the hall of fame but Mo Lewis and Vinny Testaverde were very good players. You don't seem to like too many of our former players or coaches. Are you a Jets fan or did you just follow the Idzick bandwagon from Seattle to New York when he came here?
How can you possibly still defend not paying Revis and Cro 15 mil combined for 1 year after what we now know? We could have had a good team and still been way under the cap. How is that not better than saving a few mil and being a 2-3 win team? And I am curious to see what free agents will be in a rush to sign with a 2-14 team with no qb and Idzik as gm.
I think the better question is how can you still act like paying Revis and Cro that kind of money for one year would have been a good idea. We would have been a 5 win team, maybe, we would have pissed away $13-$14 mil of next year's salary and we would still be shit out of cornerbacks this coming year. There was not a single logical reason to sign both of them. Cro, maybe, but both? No. Not one good reason. Unless you somehow think they would have put us over the top. And in that case, you would be wrong.
interesting.... the offseason failure of the GM with regard to the CB position has put the team in the envious position of getting a top 5 pick at the start of each round come May. conversely...if he acted like most thought he should've, we would likely be a 6-7 win team and going nowhere... so the "strategy" so to say has accelerated the clean out and in 2-3 years we may look back and actually thank him for it.
Idzik is on record as saying he'd rather do the right thing and get fired for it than the wrong thing and survive. Amazingly enough that may be what happens. There are lots of GMs out there who would have sunk resources into a mediocre season to save their job and then seen mediocre results moving forward.
I dont think strategy necessarily was to get a terrible pick but I do think it was pretty obvious that spending money on two corners that will be here for a year (or pay them way too much to stay longer) in year 2 of a rebuild was just flat out dumb. You are a fringe wildcard team at best and you lose that money in year 3 of a rebuild. If you've convinced yourself that we were Revis and Cro away from contention, God bless. That's special.
Mo Lewis was a good linebacker, but he wasn't elite, like say Ray Lewis or Urlacher. And Testaverde, I remember rooting for Pennington to replace him from pretty much the moment we drafted him. People are wearing nostalgia goggles or something. Liking our players/coaches has nothing to do with objectively evaluating them. Parcells was an excellent head coach and Belichick and Weiss were really good coordinators, but the fact remains they only won the big one when they took the time to build the team up right. Aaron Glenn was an excellent player during those days, Curtis Martin was great, Mawae was really good. Testaverde was mediocre. 98 was a career year for him because much like Sanchez in 2010, he was surrounded by a good offensive line, good running game, good receivers, good coaches, good defense. Most QBs in the NFL can look good in those circumstances, but that doesn't make them the kind of QB you win a Superbowl with. I can defend it because apparently I have a different goal from you. You are just happy to root for a "competitive" team whose ceiling is being on the bubble of competing for a playoff spot. I am not interested in that, I want to root for a team that's built to compete for a championship. That's what a lot of impatient fans don't get. Rebuilding feeds itself, because if you stick to young developing players instead of old established veterans, very often this leads to less wins during the rebuilding seasons, but also gives you higher picks and fills teams with more talent. It's not that Idzik is tanking on purpose, it's just a natural consequence of rebuilding.
Then in that case I'm glad Woody keep Rex. If Idzik would had hired his own HC that means his plan would also be draft/sign sorry ass players and take chances on injury prone players.
I'm fairly sure Idzik's plan was to see if Geno panned out this year and if he didn't to go get a QB in 2015. He missed the fact that if Dee Milliner got hurt the Jets would be in real trouble on the backend and he oversaw a few questionable picks (McDougle, Saunders, Boyd) in a deep draft. He got unlucky with Milliner going out and with all his stopgaps at CB flaming out for one reason or another. The one real question I have about what happened this year is who decided to stick with Geno until the bitter end. He should have been replaced by Vick at 1-3 or 1-4 at the outside and the Jets kept going back to the well with him and hoping it would get better.
I think Vick never showed up in training camp, so the staff knew they were stuck in limbo at QB. Either that, or he was outright lied to that he'd be competing for the starting spot and he's been on a sit down strike all season. But for some reason the staff knew they couldn't put him on the field.
