I hear ya I'm on the edge of being through with this team. It is amazing the dysfunction of this franchise. I have extreme high hope for Salah but he looks overwhelmed and maybe he is just a coordinator. Not ready for prime time.
3 seconds wow. I would be happy with late round competent offensive linemen. Douglas went dumpster diving on this bunch. They are not even Arena quality. Rodger won't need cleats he should be issued roller skates. The late round thing is pretty weak. Most of the linemen in the NFL are later rounds or UDFA. I don't care where they are drafted the Jets don't coach them up properly or just get the worst linemen left. Maybe they should have bought Aaron Rodgers's offensive line coaches with him. Because the current line is gonna have Rodgers running...all game
Rodgers is going to make that decision for the Jets. Maybe then Woody will have had enough and sell the team. I heard that from somewhere.
Nobody said things are static. Unlike most i'm just willing acknowledge that bringing in a 40yo declining QB, with 1 foot into retirement and attached to what arguably could be pointed out as the worst looking contract in the NFL at the time, didn't happen in a vacuum. And that there were a lot more "better then anything we had" options out there to be easily had, and pretty much all of which that didn't carry the kind of extensive price tag in surrounding sacrifices Rodgers did. You want to talk timelines? No problem. Hell, going back to the UNFILTERED timeline is one of the easiest methods to highlight all the "things poorly run franchises do 101" warning signs that started popping up from the start and way before that ink even dried on those finalized trade papers. Again, before we got to the point of many fans literally cheering on much of unrecoverable fail foundation of 2023 as it was being put into place. Let's take a quick peak at that broad spectrum and rewind the timeline right back to 1/8/2023. Where on one side of the coin you had the Jets putting their finishing touch on that epically bad 6 loses in a row to shut the door and close their season down. Where on the other side you had a soon to be 40yo Rodgers putting his own finishing touches on the kind of decline season anybody not reaching for "Tom Brady did it!" outliers would rationally expect out of a past their prime and (by their own latter admission) on the brink of potential retirement QB. Fresh off, let's not of course forget, feeding the media criticism that has surrounded him much of that career when he essentially and yet again got sent home after coming up small in a win-and-u-are-in game vs Detroit. Ya know, back to a day you could scour the internet and I will challenge anybody to find a single non-troll soul anywhere championing the idea of bringing in Nathaniel Hackett as this team next OC. Back when we were all in more or less in excited universal agreement that the "Zach Wilson Is Our Guy" era was lying 6 feet in the ground, and that beyond Saleh paying the typical "we still think he's got a promising future" lip service in the media there was a literal 100% chance the team was moving on. Back when we also were all in universal agreement that "we just need to get average QB play" to move this team forward". Back when the first major report was right around the corner coming out of SNY that it was Lamar Jackson, and not Aaron Rodgers, that the team would be 'first in line" for in the event he became available (which for latter note if you want to keep going btw was before people would like to now believe that it was Joe D apparently forgetting how to do any 101 GM'ing, and to at least feign a potential renewed interest in that possibility latter to help better leverage his position on the AR comp front). Or is going back that far, and not playing nice with the fairy tale narrative a lot of people ended up painting around all this with the Kal El and "SUPERBOWL OR BUST!" nonsense, not work for you?
I mean there was no evidence of a decline in rodgers. he was MVP at 37 and 38. at 39 he had a down year playing with a broken thumb and no WRs (FWIW mahomes is having a down year when healthy right now because of his WRs). It's not the 1st time we've done it either. we did it in 1998 with vinny and it worked well. we did it in 2007 with fave and it worked well for half a season until he got hurt. we did it with fitz (to a lesser level) in 2015 and won 10 games. The bucs did it with brady in 2020 (who was 43) and won a SB. rams kinda did it with stafford and won a SB. the results have been kinda everywhere. it works sometimes and sometimes it doesn't. His contract though IDK where you get that. rodgers has by far the most friendly QB contract of any QB in the NFL. he was making 50/mil a year guarenteed when we traded for him. he took a paycut of 12.5m a year. he's making less then daniel jones and the same as carr. he's tied for 13th salary wise which is basically "average QB" but he's an elite top 5 QB for the past 15 years pretty much. In Jan you can say "coming off 6 losses" or you can say even with a shit QB we were 7-4 until all the injuries got to overwhelming. I mean there was a point where our whole offense was basically backups and PS players. It was after AVT and hall went down in the same game that we never won another one. So looking at that and getting the injured players back plus adding to the QB on paper looked great. we'll never know for sure since again everyone got hurt. they changed the field this offseason, we changed coahcing staffs, JD went after players w/o health issues and still too many injuries. for now 5-6years straight we've been a top 3 team in the "BUS" rating which is basically how injured your team has been. The teams that win stay mostly healthy. I can't tell you why we have so many injuries, but it's hard to blame the GM for that. sometimes in life shit is just bad luck and nobody is to blame, but humans in general have a hard time excepting that they don't have control and get comfort in blaming someone because then it feels fixable. humans don't like having no control by nature.
For starters I want to point out that there is good reason to be a lot less bull'ish on how good Trevor is actually projecting to be at this point, and at least potentially makes that miss a lot less painful in the always lingering bigger picture. But anyway: I personally think the whole extreme outlook that it's gotta be all or nothing and a "dream big on a fairytale ending with a high draft pick hit or bust" is completely outdated. Typically coming with a too healthy dose of putting the cart before the horse mindset, and too unhealthy of an acknowledge dose at the front end on just how much and for how long those draft misses can realistically be projected to set you back with the whole demanded patience aspect baked in. . At this point the Jets are team that just need to get to a point of stringing together a few seasons of sustained winning. That the fans can at least go into watching every game with a reasonable expectation chance to win. Any absolute demand it needs to be more then that is just setting yourself up for failure imo. I'd strongly argue that in the grander scheme of things the much better approach bet lies in the find your own Ben Johnson and take a flyer shot on the always available (and already more polished) QB talent out there who might just be a better coach/situation away from paying out an actual positive dividend. Especially for say...a team that already has a league better defense in place. Give me that and the quick turnaround out if needed option all day right now over yet another cycle run of spending at least 3 years hoping a guy stops sucking.
We would have had that and more if JD didn't completely drop the ball on OLine again. White got hurt too behind similar shit line last year. Behind this line no QB can function. If unlike this year GM does things right to help his QB out next offseason, which is a very realistic task, I think not only can we start putting winning seasons together, but the dream scenario is possible as well in 2024. It would have been possible this year too if JD didn't fall asleep and actually did his job after getting Rodgers.
I disagree, but I’m glad you said it. This FO told us we had a championship roster already, the final piece was QB. I don’t want Mike Evans or Freeman. They’re old and expensive and they’ll be anchors on our cap for years after Rodgers is gone. The draft and FA should be about the future. If that helps this already championship team as they (and you) say in the present then great. But if we pass on a high level QB in the top 5 of this draft or trade our first for some overpriced FA it will haunt this team for years. Seriously, can you fucking wait to look back on this saying “remember when we passed up on <insert great young QB> for that 2nd year of Rodgers looking like total old trash!?! Yeah great times!!”
No signs of Rodgers declining? You mean besides being an aging QB entering his forties in itself, and one who saw his production metrics drop across the board? Which i will again point out was to a level where his overall play arguably wasn't even notably better or more efficient in 2022 then a lot of those much cheaper and much lower commitment level alternative options that were readily available. There was never some "It's either get Rodgers or play Zach again" mandate in place. Or are we just ignoring that here, and instead extending that same singularity focus mentioned above into simply defaulting back to more desired narrative friendly re-write at just how much that week 5 thumb injury actually appeared or was reported to have affected Rodgers at the time and throughout his entire season's body of work? Mahomes won the MVP last year with a similar WR room unless you want to equally re-write Juju in as some notable needle pusher. Does that just get whitewashed out too for not fitting the desired narrative of your conclusion analysis? What about the infinitely more prevalent track record of QBs not named Tom Brady at or near Rodgers' age we can reference that went from playing at an MVP level to retirement in a 2 year or less time period after seeing a similar year of decline? And further more what relevance do all those other examples of what other teams did have to do with what was ultimately in the best interests of *this* team and where *it's* realistic chances of being an 2023 ARod away from seriously competing this year? Are we supposed to pretend it was logically GB's supporting cast around him that was some slum of talent dragging his production down, but *OUR* comparative pile of clearly superior offensive coaching/player riches over here was supposed to reasonably produce notably better results? Listen, I'm as excited about Garrett Wilson as much as the next guy (one of the few Jets shirts I've bought over the last 10 years), but at this point how much better or more "special" he is compared to a lot of other talented young guys out there NOT getting a 25% target share and putting up a noteworthy amount of their stats once the game is already out of reach is up for fair debate until it's not. Pushing back all that money on Rodgers' contract doesn't make it "friendly" either if you never actually believed Rodgers was going to to be some big needle pusher for us on the field to begin with. It was terrible before he reworked it out of necessity if he wanted to keep playing football on his own much more attractive terms over that VERY ugly reality that was otherwise going to be staring him down on the other side, and I don't think i'm going out on a limb to guess that there will literally be nobody here cheering on those 2025 salary considerations after the NY negativity train happily runs Rodgers right out of town after next year's same ol story disaster plays out with him leading the charge. Just like you could say "we were still good enough to beat Buffalo!" after Josh all but handed us over game 1 of this year. Or been among one of the many sitting around a couple weeks ago pointing at our 4-3 record while dismissing anybody who wanted to question just how sustainable the "winning" that went into that really was. But at some point you gotta stop putting so much stock in the smaller and cherry picked out sample sizes of success though as opposed to the entire pie. And while I wouldn't argue with you that injuries didn't play some role in last season's back end struggles, i'm also just not gonna ignore the fact that piling up injuries as the season goes on are just a reality part of the game and hardly an exclusive to the NY Jets.Nor will i use them to make that titanic sized leap you want to use that to rationalize our 2022 roster into looking more productive then it actually was. Eespecially while simultaneously discounting the other side's injuries that played no small role by any stretch in fair amount of those few wins it did manage to get early on.
I don't want a QB because I have no faith in this GM and CS to actually develop a QB, but I'm with you about the QB. If taking a QB promised me that the entire regime is gone, I'm with it.
I’m not here to argue whether we should or shouldn’t have brought in Rodgers because I get both sides of the argument. I also believe this is ultimately going to be a stain on the Jets for the long term even if we get a playoff berth next year. However, some of this is misleading. 1 - you just can’t discount the fact that he played with a broken thumb for much of the year and still dragged that team to within a win and get in game of the playoffs. Have you ever even sprained your thumb? I don’t know how you can tell me a broken bone in your hand wouldn’t affect the throwing of a football. They were 3-1 entering that 5th game as well. 2 - what free agent QB (other than Carr) was giving us perhaps a mirror image at worst of 3700 yards, 26TD/12INT’s? It’s not even certain Carr will get there at this point. 3 - it is true that the Chiefs receivers are relatively similar to last year. However, Mahomes didn’t lose his top target (Kelce) as Rodgers did (Adams). That’s kind of like taking Kelce off the roster and putting Luke Musgrave on the squad and saying oh the results would be the same.
It wasn't a bad move to get Rodgers. In fact, under the circumstances, it was a good move. Given that no one can predict the future, and especially a future where he would be hurt 5 snaps into this season, it was very reasonable to expect that he could give the Jets 2 years of high level QB play, during which time Zach could sit and learn and hopefully become the FQB they thought they drafted. If you go back about 10 months that plan seemed rational. And even if they decided Zach wasn't the future FQB, they would've had time to find his replacement. But the other element that this plan relied on was having a much improved OL and weapons. The weapons seemed to be taken care of with Breece expected to return, to go with OROY Wilson, and decent supporting cast. But the OL? I would love to know why Douglas thought that was anything close to fixed. What was his rationale going into FA and the draft that led him to believe that the OL, which was shaky at best, was good enough to protect Rodgers? Why did he feel the need to draft yet another DL with his first pick when he had such holes on the OL? And I'd really love to know why OL has been such a "stepchild" for the Jets for so long? And of course we now see that that weapons weren't really taken care of, at least with this HC/OC in charge. All that said, IF...IF Rodgers can return, at least for a full season next year and hopefully the following year, and play close to his historical level, and IF...IF Douglas FINALLY addresses the OL once and for all, the Jets can still contend. And because Rodgers would be the QB, the need for having an offensive minded HC and a decent OC is greatly reduced. But, if Rodgers can't perform that role for at least next season, it looks like another tear down will be required, possibly including a new GM as well.
He doesn't have to be at his historical level though. The corpse of Peyton Manning was carried by that Denver team that won the Super Bowl in 2015. Peyton was god awful in 2015. Less than 60% comp, 9TD:17INT. They were a below average offense, if Rodgers is just average this team competes as long as the defense remains in the top 5ish. (Denver allowed 18.5 PPG that season)
everyone declines differently. age alone isn't a reason enough. jerry rice playing WR a position most are done but their ealry to mid 30s had one of his best seasons at 40 years old. fave came here at 40 and was great until his arm gave out mid season due to injury. then went to minnesota and had one of his best seasons (if not his best) at 41. tom brady after he turned 40 had a better 5 year span then most QBs ever do in their career. Elite players often can "defy the norm" and rodgers is an elite player. and had 2 of his best seasons at ages 37 and 38. the reason most players diminish and wear down is they lose speed (which isn't a big deal for a QB) or piling up of injuries over time. Rodgers hasn't had any injury concerns that would wear his body down. he had a broken thumb last year not a big deal and played through it.
Bringing Rodgers in was a bad move. Both dumb and desperate. Our rebuild was slow but it was making progress. It would have been better to stay the course and keep our picks and our cap healthy rather than going all in on an ancient QB. We'd had 5 losing seasons in a row and it been 12 years since Rodgers led a team to the SB. We weren't a QB away from the SB - we were a QB and several lineman away from a playoff appearance. We sacrificed our future for a chance at a wildcard game, and we are going to feel it. Were feeling it right now by signing the players Rodgers wanted. Were going to feel it next draft and FA period. We're going to feel it in 2025 when we owe a 43 year old QB 50 million dollars, while owing Breece, Garrett, and Sauce second contracts. Even if we start tearing it down next year by trading Garrett, etc, we wont really have the money to build. Jumping the gun for Rodgers means we probably wont have chance at a valid playoff team again until 2027, maybe 2026 if lightning strikes.
What was a bigger loss? Having Tyreek and Kelce and losing Tyreek or having Davante Adams and Allen Lazard and losing Adams?
