I don't think Woody has the negative reputation among his peers that you think he does. The Jets have actually been a moderately successful organization over the span he's owned the team, better than half the other teams in the NFL. He's spent a lot of money to improve the team over the years. Yeah, he's a publicity hound and that definitely brings him down some but he hasn't been a bad owner at all. Compare him to people like Dan Snyder and Jerry Jones and his results and methods actually look pretty good by comparison. Jerry Jones, BTW, is not looked down upon by his peers. He's the biggest publicity hound out there and he still has the respect of his peers for his money-making acumen and for his ability to keep the Cowboys in the limelight when their results are somewhat more pedestrian than that. I think Woody would have no trouble finding a new management team if he made a serious attempt to do so. He'd just need to convince them that he was really interested in building a great organization. He'd need to pay them well also.
I totally disagree with you here. It is not Woody's love of publicity that is so much the problem as how it leads him to do things like the Tebow trade. It's also clear to me that the CS is forced to deal with that kind of move, and can't be too happy about it. You are very critical of the team's approach to drafting. Why do you think this is not something that Woody should share the blame on? Related to that point, you are also critical of Tanny. Tanny is Woody's boy, and serves at his pleasure. The fish rots from the head, dude. Face it.
I would welcome Russ Ball or Rob Davis from the Packers but I really like Heckert. I don't think you can deny he is doing a nice job bringing in talent to the Browns organization. If Stephen Ross gets smart and fires Ireland, I would be very happy with any of those three. Unfortunately, I think Ross' loyalty clouds his ability to see how inept Ireland is.
.500 is kind of like sitting there at room temperature, not rotting yet. My criticism of the Jets is based largely on their inability to take the step up from average team to consistent contender. I don't lose sight of the fact that they've actually been a very average team over Woody's ownership tenure. I demand more from my team because I'm getting older and I don't want to be a fan that spent 70 years rooting for a team without ever seeing them win. My opinion on the hate for Woody is that it is based on two factors primarily. The most important one is that the Jets had a largely middle-class clientele as season ticket holders when he took over and a lot of those people have been pushed out of the building by ticket prices and PSL's. This is a valid reason to hate professional football and pro sports in general over the last decade or so but it is a bad reason to hate Woody. Hating the messenger won't ever fix the message and nobody is ever going to own the Jets again in the NY/NJ area without charging a huge premium for tickets. That's a 1% vs 99% issue and it isn't caused by pro sports, just reflected there. The secondary factor is that he is a prominent Republican in a Democratic town. People just need to get over that. The NFL and politics just don't mix. If you really can't stand Woody because of his politics and you're frustrated by the team there is an easy solution: go root for the Pats. Good team owned by a prominent Democrat. Both problems solved in one fell swoop. Have fun with that.
Woody took over a team in better shape than it is in now. That's my main beef with him. I don't like his politics, but I don't like McElroy's, either, and you know what i think of him. And worse than where the Jets are now is that i fully expect a decline before things improve. In any event, i was not talking about me. I was talking about how anyone considering the Jet GM job would feel about Woody's meddling in team affairs. I think the Tebow trade was so bad that it does down as the worst management decision in the NFL this past year. And that is saying something. That goes against Woody, and is central to the role he plays in the management of this team. Any prospect for GM has to ask themselves whether they will have total control, or will have to deal with an owner with a proven track record of involving himself in the team's management, to the team's detriment. You talk about Jerry Jones. I don't like Jerry Jones, fwiw, but at least he has taken the time and made the effort to better understand how to run the team. I get no sense of that from Woody. Woody has never run anything successfully. He inherited his money. He has no proven track record elsewhere. There is no reason to think he will succeed with a hands on management style. And of course I am not saying he has tried to do that, either. No, he's taking that even worse approach of not learning about the management of the team on an everyday level, but instead dropping in as it suits him to make some usually damaging management decision. I think you are unfairly characterizing my views of him as mostly about his politics. I don't think they are about that.
The Jets have won 6 playoff games since Woody took over in 2001 (yeah I know he owned them in 2000 but that was Parcells team still). That's as many playoff games as they had won in the 40 years before that. I really think your hatred of Woody has blinded you to exactly how effective he has been as an owner, which is to say moderately effective. I can think of about 15 teams right now where I'd hate having their owner instead of Woody and that includes the Cowboys.
The Jets were 20 minutes away from the SB before Woody bought the team, and had a more solid organization then than now. He threw money at the team in a win now short term approach, and failed. Meanwhile the organization is in worse shape than when he bought it. Your put down of my pov as based on politics is, frankly, insulting. I am not blinded by anything. Jerry Jones's politics are no doubt the same as or worse than Woody's. But at least Jerry Jones did not trade for Tebow. Only Woody did that. We will have to agree to disagree on this one.
I'm not going to agree to disagree though. Woody took over a franchise headed for cap hell that was in the depths of despair because Parcells had failed spectacularly with Vinny's achilles and been unable to get up off the mat. The franchise had been given the finger by Bill Belichek before he ran out of town. The augurs were perfect for a total collapse back into SOJ hell. Instead they've been moderately successful for a decade now and have not had back to back losing records at any point during that span. You cannot look at Woody's tenure as Jets owner and call it a failure by any criteria other than Champs. The average NFL fan would have been very happy to have their team have the run the Jets have had over the last decade. I want more. I want a really good team that contends seriously for a Super Bowl on a consistent basis. That doesn't make me want another owner though. At least not until somebody comes up with an idea that I'm sure would be better than Woody and that's hard to do. Would you rather have had Donald Trump over the last decade? James Dolan maybe?
has he? bc last time i checked we have a ton of money invested in subpar players (or I should say players not deserving of they money they received for their caliber) and are cap strapped this year and next.
You can insist all you want, but the team is worse off now than when he bought the team. This team had real talent, the best RB they've ever had when Woody took over, four picks in the first round one year, and a winning attitude thanks to Parcells. But when Woody bought the team, Parcells did not want to stay with him. Neither did Belichek. Since then the team has had its ups and downs, but has been around .500, and now faces a likely decline and need to rebuild. His tenure has had its moments, but overall he has gone about managing a team's approach that I don't think is likely to produce the best results, and neither do you. The fact that his main competition bidding on the team was Dolan does not excuse that he has not been a good owner. He has not learned anything. A travesty like the Tebow trade was just this year, not early in his tenure. Woody's focus on the West Side Stadium deal was wrongheaded from the get go. His failure to get that led him to essentially have to cut a deal with the Giants, and the net result is neither set of fans is happy with sharing a stadium. The team is not getting better. Tanny has been the GM for six years now. Sanchez has been the Qb for four years, and the team has an awful contract situation with him. You can be a, well, male member and continue to defend him, but I am comfortable with my position that he has been a bad owner, and is not getting any better. Let's see what happens this off season to the team's management. Let's see who the starting Qb is next year. Maybe Woody will pleasantly surprise me. I am not holding my breath.
You are forgetting a salary cap problem of epic proportions, a 35 year old starting QB, many of the stars on the team at or over 30 and of course the loss of 3 games in a row at the end of 2000 - denying the Jets a playoff spot. The memory of how things were is often better than the reality and you're stuck on that. The cap problem was so bad that the Jets had to give away their starting CB tandem alongside a young offensive lineman to get around it. They picked the right pieces to give away, so they made the playoffs 2 out of 3 years after that, but it was a nasty place to be in. As to Parcells and Belichik leaving: Parcells has been such a bastion of stability with the two franchises he went too between 2001 and 2008 that it is clear that Woody was the problem here. Parcells would never ring and run after four seasons - oh no he wouldn't do that. The team that best survived a Parcells visit was the Jets. They just kept making the playoffs every other season after he left. But to you that's Woody's fault somehow. Belichik was a Pats fan growing up in New England. There is no way he was saying no when Kraft opened up the checkbook. His issues in NY weren't with Woody either, they were with Parcells. I can think of a bunch of NFL teams with new owners that have been worse since he came on the scene. I don't think he's done the best he possibly could but I'll still take him over the likely competition. It excuses a lot for me. Dolan would have been a disaster based on how his other teams have performed. Like him or hate him you have to recognize that Woody has at least gotten some results out of all the cash he put into the team. There are plenty of potential owners in NY who would have been worse. I'd have had to give up rooting for the NY Trumps. The West Side Stadium was a pipe-dream and was also clearly the reason that the Jets intrigued Woody in the first place. That he has held on despite not getting that done speaks well of him. Lots of people would have gone and sulked in the corner when their chance at the lottery expired. Yep, the Jets are at a crossroads again. Hopefully one that involves Woody cleaning house and starting to put what he has learned over the last decade or so to use. It's what you learn after you think you know it all that counts most in the end.
If we manage to win out or even go 8-8 I think nothing will change from GM to QB. Certainly not if we happen to make the PO's. Talent and depth aside, I believe we need a new OC, Conditioning guy, LB coach, WR coach and DEFINATELY QB coach.
If the jets go 8-8 this season it proves...I'm going to hate saying this, that Big Blocker is right. MT has put an 8-8 team on the field in back to back seasons, and a team that cannot compete against the better teams in the NFL. My fear is that if the Jets end up 8-8 nothing will change, which means MT will draft terribly again and with an easy schedule next year we continue the same cycle of mediocrity.
I don't care if the Jets end up winning the Super Bowl or not winning another game the rest of the way, I want Terry Bradway out of this organization once and for all. I don't see Tannenbaum getting fired... more likely getting "promoted" out of a decision making position. Tannenbaum's genius has always been with managing the cap and nothing has changed there. This upcoming offseason isn't the first time we've gone in with Mike T hearing about the Jets cap is completely and utterly hosed just to find out that Mike T had it totally under control all along. Still, the decision making has been questionable far too many times. It would be a good thing to get a new GM in here.
Here's the problem with this line of thought: it's the same line of thought that got Terry Bradway retained as the personnel guru. The general meme on him was that he was a personnel guy who was out of his league making decisions on other issues and that he couldn't manage negotiations well, which got the Jets reamed over and over again losing young talent and unable to get top free agent talent to come to the Jets. So you take away the thing he is bad at and what you have left is his great personnel skills, right? Except his personnel skills weren't actually great and when the Parcells/Groh talent melted away the Jets were kind of bad. Since then the Jets have had similar problems building a talent base and generally speaking the draft has been a wash for them instead of the boon it should be. So now you have Tannenbaum who is a cap expert but overmatched on the personnel side, since the talent is what is keeping the Jets down right now. So you take away the thing he is bad at and what you have left is his great cap management skills, right? Except his cap management skills aren't actually great, because the Jets are up against the cap now several years in a row and they're not there because they're paying great players. They're there because the cap costs keep getting pushed a year down the road and average players cap costs are starting to look like great players cap costs. The guarantees that he's had to pass out to get players to defer compensation aren't really brilliant, they're more brute force, since no player will say no to the same amount of money in the end if they also get an un-cuttable year out of it to try to extend their declining career. The truth is that Tannenbaum is not a cap genius by any means. He's just avoided painting himself into the corner by an increasingly narrow margin. That margin has now gotten really thin and the Revis situation may well put him in the corner finally. I think you just need to start over. Get fresh eyes in house and start operating like a great franchise. Even if you can't get there right away it's pretty clear you'll never get there using the fraying mechanisms that have been in place over the last decade. You can't get everybody to re-examine their game plan in a big way once they've settled into it. You're kind of there at that point and hoping it all works out. To get real change you need to make real changes. That's where the Jets are.
Parcells/Groh talent?:rofl2: Groh did a good job in his year but he had FOUR 1st rd picks so it's hard to screw that up. Parcells was an awful evaluator of talent and we sustained success after those guys, under BP/Groh we had ONE postseason app(despite inheriting a very talented team by the way), under Bradway the Jets made THREE, w/ TB in the organization we'd made SIX.
