I think this team is getting to the point of mediocrity. Not even bad, mediocrity. I look at this current roster though, and I think there is just a lot of mediocrity. How many good NFL starters do we have that are 26 or younger and could theoretically be starters and difference makers for the Jets for another 5-10 years? I can only think of 4 of them (Mo, Sheldon, Leo and Calvin), and the best of them might not even be on the team next year because they won't give him the contract he deserves. Decker, Carpenter, Gilchrist, Powell, Giacomini give us some solid NFL starters in their prime, but these are not players that win you many football games, they are complimentary players. We also have a few nice young players with some potential to maybe be NFL starters (Petty, Enunwa, Amaro, Mauldin, Catapano, Milliner, Williams), but none of them are proven NFL starters yet. At best maybe we get two or three starters out of that group, nothing too great. As long as we have the likes of Revis, Marshall, Mangold, Clady, Fitz, Harris, Forte around, we probably won't be terrible, there are at least five teams with a worse core group of players, but these are not long-term players for this team. I'd be surprised if any of them are with the team for more than another three years. These are short term stop-gap options. Some of these players are some of our highest paid and most important players on the team. They are good enough to win us some games and keep us from a 3-13 or 4-12 season, but not good enough to get us to the playoffs. We didn't make the playoffs in a weak AFC last season. What makes anyone think things will be better this season? We have gotten worse since the offseason started, our schedule is brutal and we might not even have our best player (Mo) on the team next season. So my main question is this, why worry about Fitzpatrick this or Fitzpatrick that? How about just surveying the landscape of the team and realizing this team needs to be rebuilt? Someone explain to me where I am going wrong on this........
Personnel changes so quickly in the NFL that it doesn't matter that much. Get a good coach (check), a GM who drafts well (check) and a franchise QB (we need this), and you can go from bad to good almost immediately.
Pretty much this. As long as you have a good coach and a GM who knows how to draft well, we will be fine. But I get OP's point. Current roster is aging and it is safe to assume we will be mediocre for a while.
Perhaps we can find the Lazarus Pit and throw Revis and all of the old players in the pit and they should get younger no?
We kind of did rebuild. That's what the Idzik era was. It's a 2 part process: purge the roster of bad contracts and draft well. We did the former and not the former. I do think we are kind of behind the 8 ball a bit. We have to bridge the gap between our aging core players and collection of young difference makers. We will be stuck in perpetual mediocrity if we continue to trade picks for aging vets while not doing better in Days 2 and 3 of the draft.
The Jets are an average team. They've been an average team for the last 11 years or so. They were an above average team from 1997-2004. They were a bad team verging on terrible from 1987-1996. Hopefully we're headed for above average again.
who expects us to be better this season? the consensus seems to be 8-9 wins. this team is still rebuilding. we added some older vets, which i dont agree with but on short money. this team is still building the framework of prolonged success. i look at the moves we HAVENT made. we didnt bring back cro. we arent extending wilkerson. we are holding strong with fitz. extremely encouraging. it will be 2-3 years of good drafting before this ship is ready to set sail
This is not a rebuilding team. We have simply retooled the roster by bringing in older players in an attempt to be competitive now while drafting players to develop behind the vets in hopes that they are ready to step up once we move on from the vets.
How is the team worse now than it was when the offseason started? What great players have they lost? If you're referring to Snacks, Mo and Fitz, they did this to the team with their greed and unrealistic expectations overvaluing their worth. The team had cap issues this year, but even if they didn't I doubt if Mac would have overpaid them. None of the three is worth what he is asked for. Even so, Fitz could be back and we could have Mo for this season. Snacks found someone stupid enough to overpay him to be a 2-down player. Mac shouldn't have paid him that much. Mac replaced Snacks with a solid NT, and the Jets have a young NT (Simon) that they're supposedly high on. They added Jarvis Jenkins to the DL. He's a solid player and versatile. One minute you're whining about older players who won't be here in 3 years instead of the Jets having young, up and coming players, then the next you're complaining about the young players. Really, this is one of the most ignorant posts I've seen in a while. Tanny left the cupboard bare with his missed picks, constant trading up, and ignoring certain positions. Idzik left the cupboard even more bare, almost totally blowing a 12 player draft. Mac has had one draft to try to address a myriad of holes and depth issues. He's done the best he can or probably that anyone could have done addressing needs and adding talent. The Jets easily could have been a playoff team last year, and probably should have been. How many years has it been since they even looked like a real offense, a real football team, or were even within sniffing distance of the playoffs? Mac is trying to make the team competitive while he's rebuilding the roster, but it's going to take a while. The Jets had a ton of holes and little depth. Mac attempted to upgrade the OL in FA by trying to sign Osemele and Beachum, but both signed elsewhere. Brick forced Mac's hand by retiring, and Mac did an awesome job adding Clady. If Clady is healthy and can stay that way, he is an immediate upgrade over Brick. If the Jets can draft a quality OT, he could replace Giacomini, and the right side of the OL could quickly get a lot better. He re-signed Powell, and added Forte and Robinson. The Jets now have a deeper, better RB corps than they had last season, and quite possibly have one of the best RB groups in the NFL. There were no great QBs or TEs for him to sign. On D he addressed holes/needs on the DL, re-signed E. Henderson and then added a great coverage LB in Bruce Carter. The latter is something we haven't had in a long time (a LB who excels in coverage). He either cut or allowed a lot of dead wood to leave the team via FA. We have an excellent CS, who should be even better this season with a year's experience. They know their players better, have worked together, and Bowles has a year as a HC under his belt. Most of the players will know the systems better, and should be even more efficient and productive this season. Mac has shown that he has an eye for talent. There is every reason to be hopeful and optimistic about the team's future. One just has to be patient and reasonable in one's expectations. Did you just now realize that the team needs to be rebuilt? If so, where have you been the last 3-4 years?
Why not recognize a need to rebuild and get that franchise QB like other teams are now doing through an early first? The attempt last season to sign and trade for a number of good players didn't work, we all saw what happened, the team is now worse. All those aging veterans weren't enough to make us a playoff team. Its time to realize a mistake was made with all those signings and trades, and just move towards making this team really bad so we can get a high pick to eventually become good. Why even discuss Fitz as an option? Why sign Forte? Why re-sign Powell? We have to be looking toward who can help in 2-3 years, not who helps the most now. Now doesn't really matter for this team. I don't know if some won't admit it, but this team is headed for a very mediocre season. 10-6 isn't happening again. Try 7-9 or 8-8, and everyone will be mad about whats happening at the end of the season when we are picking 15th with a terrible cap situation and tons of players on contracts that are bad for the team.
Look at how bad teams who have gotten good (Denver, Seattle, and Arizona come to mind) have done it. It wasn't through tanking, it was by hiring quality people to run the team (Elway, Carroll, Arians) and trying to improve from Day 1. The best example for tanking you can come up with is probably Carolina, but hiring Rivera was just as much the reason for their success as drafting Newton.
I actually think Mac is a good GM and Bowles might eventually be a good HC in this league, but I really think your view of the roster is unrealistic. There was a hope going into last season that we could be the top defense in the league, get solid offense, and be an under the radar contender. We didn't have a bad record, but it still didn't work. The experiment with all those big contracts and trades just didn't work. This type of plan to build the team was always going to be tough. Most of the top teams in the league built through the draft. We tried to build through free agency and trades, a very quick rebuild after the Idzik area, and I don't think it worked. Even if you were happy with last season, I don't understand how anyone could think we haven't gotten worse in the offseason. This is also an older team. There's very little margin for error. If there was a window, it was last season, its not 2-3 years from now with these same players. I think its time to tear it all down. It seems like thats what we did a few seasons ago, but we tried a really quick rebuild, and I don't think its worked. Get the top 5 pick next year, get that franchise QB, see where we are from there. I think anyone who actually is trying to analyze this team for this season and has an optimistic view is really being set up for disappointment. This is a very mediocre team with a lot of aging players on big contracts.
I'm of the opinion that after what I watched last season from this team, what we really need is a QB. Fitz wasn't bad, but the margin for error with such average QB play (compared to other starters around the league) is so thin. You have to have the best defense in the league like Denver and have elite playmakers on offense, like Denver had. I really don't want us to continue with these band-aid solutions. Even in this draft, after finishing out of the playoffs, we aren't even in position to pick a QB in the first round. How many seasons are we going to try this for? We need to get a starting QB. If this team can't get in a position to draft it by fielding a decent team, we have to field a bad team. We wasted our time with the quick re-build. I think its a failure after one year.
