Brady is a good coach. He should be a lot better. My comment wasn’t even about Sam. I was thinking about us and Wilson. I feel we may see a lot of the same things next year. I wonder if the vitriol will be the same.
That's my fear if we draft Fields. He will be Bad Sam reincarnated....holding the ball forever, not recognizing blitzes, taking sacks when he could throw the balls away, etc. But he will have a presumably much better coaching staff than Darnold did and hopefully he can learn and improve in those areas because from a physical standpoint the guy has it all.
Not me. I feel like a weight has been lifted off of my shoulders. Clean slate. Put the Gase and Bowles eras behind us. Start fresh with Saleh and Wilson. If I was the Jets GM, that would have been a really tough decision for me. Obviously I like Sam a lot, but also because of what you could build around him with a trade down from #2. Definitely no seller's remorse though. It had to be done. The Jets finally have a proper format with a General Manager hiring his Head Coach and drafting his QB. That is how it is supposed to me. We just need Zach Wilson to be a good QB and Robert Saleh to be a good Head Coach and the future will finally look bright at One Jets Drive.
QB's are marketable and there is nothing the Jets like better than a marketable new toy to play with. The Jets value marketing over winning and will take the short term marketing angle every time over the long-term team-building choice.
I maybe put it wrong. Darnold could be a lot better in Carolina and still be an Andy Dalton caliber QB. There are several QB's in each generation of QB's who have long NFL careers without ever really being an NFL caliber QB. They just fail at a level that it is not obvious and their teams never really have a chance to win as a result - having a few good seasons when the talent on the roster is very strong but mostly failing when it is not because the QB is not good enough to elevate his teammates at critical junctions and over time. I'm a big Vinny fan but I suspect that he was one of those QB's. He was able to win some with the talent bubble that Parcells put together and one other time with a big mass of Browns talent that Belichik coached in '94 however over the other years of his career he wasn't good enough to play at the NFL level, just not clearly distinguishable in that category due to his big arm and the lack of talent around him.
Well he better get on that this year because the Panthers aren't going to wait around for him. Assuming he does step it up some he could still be not good enough to help them win and then they'll move on anyways. I really wish the Jets had kept him for this year and taken a bunch of talent in the draft. He was great cover for the organization being unable to win next year, which is a likely scenario. As you said he might have put things together however he definitely wouldn't have left us with a failed rookie QB on the field in plain sight, which is something else we may see this year.
Drafting the QB provides the new regime the cover you reference regardless of how the rookie season goes. Keeping Darnold would have shortened their leash.
My opinion, for what it's worth: We can't really know how good Darnold is because of the abysmal level of coaching on the offensive side of the ball that has been in place during the Bowles/Gase administrations. We'll know for sure after this year I would think. I know he threw ints even when there was no pressure, but how much does scheme/wr mistake/confusing instructions from coaching staff have to do with it? Ron
One would think a great QB given the bad hand Darnold was dealt would still not rank near the bottom of nearly every significant QB category for 3 years straight like Darnold did. So I feel comfortable eliminating him being great as a potential outcome. I think he can still be average or slightly better than that if he fixes some of decision making and footwork issue and gets better coaching and supporting staff.
Yes and no. Keeping Darnold and adding as much talent around him while also generally messaging that it was a rebuilding year was probably the safest way to go. It's all upside at that point, either the talent develops around Darnold and the Jets over-achieve, the talent develops around Darnold and Darnold fails or the talent fails to develop at all in which case Darnold also fails. In the first case the Jets, JD and Saleh are golden. In the second case, well they were rebuilding anyway and so they go find a QB next year to be supported by the much better talent and everybody is safe. In the third case JD gets fired. With the rookie the situation is a bit different. There is less new talent around the QB on the field and he is likely to have rookie yips at some point if he plays. So the Jets really need to be messaging rebuilding year if they put him on the field because they went 2-14 last year and rookie QB isn't going to fix that next year. The Jets could also choose the wiser but less marketable solution of nailing the rookie to the bench while messaging rebuilding year. In the first case if the rookies yips aren't too pronounced the Jets might win some games, maybe 7 or 8 with real luck. In that scenario everybody is safe. Or the rookie might really be in over his head or get injured in which case the Jets win maybe 3 to 5 games and everybody is looking over their shoulder in December/January. In the second scenario the Jets win 3-7 games and nobody is looking over their shoulder in December/January because the rookie hasn't played yet and only a really bad franchise fires a general manager for a QB pick that didn't hit the field year one. Again, if the draft is a general failure JD is going to get fired and then we're really screwed because the next GM will either want his QB pick or will take the job handcuffed to JD's QB and the misery is pushed out further for Jets fans. The best move the Jets could have made was to keep Darnold and push the QB decision to an appropriate pick this year - whenever after the #2 that was.
The thing that gets me most about the Darnold trade was that most of the compensation is in the 2022 draft anyway. So why trade him and show all your cards before this year's draft??!? I think Douglas really messed that up
Because maybe they didn't want it to be a major distraction heading into something as important as the draft?
