you are correct and the voice of reason. imagine if ELI was a Jets QB. We would have bailed on him long ago. These guys can not be for real. 7 games with a POOR OL and no real speed at WR and they are ready to cave in and want KC dumped! HUh The great one had to be benched because he threw right to the other team causing us two games. Yet some fans want him at the helm!
Chad has repeatedly failed when subjected to high levels of pressure in the playoffs. People in Dallas are talking about Tony Romo's two bad playoff games as if they make him a completely inadequate leader for the Cowboys. 2002 Chad crumbles in front of the Raiders after an inspired run. 2004 Chad crumbles in front of the Steelers. 2006 Chad crumbles in front of the Patriots. Do we really need to see him crumble in front of a superior team in 2009 in the playoffs if that's where this team is headed? The 2004 team was a damn good team with very few holes (secondary mainly). It was exactly the kind of team that people say Chad can dominate with, great offensive line, consistent rushing attack, top 5 defense that could even *gasp* stop the run. Chad didn't dominate with it even before he got hurt. He beat 4 mediocre to bad teams to start the season, along with Marty Schottenheimer, and then came back to earth as the schedule become tougher. I don't dislike Chad but I've seen enough of him to know that even if you give him the NFL's leading rusher and a top 5 defense he won't get the job done in the end. That's why I'll take Kellen Clemens growing pains and hope he's better and might someday finish what he started.
While I do like him, Chad has never been the since compiling the injuries (mostly the shoulder) plain and simple. He does not look like the same player, and I doubt will ever be more than just "serviceable" at this point.
This post is dead on. Even assuming that we're able to completely revamp the O-line and somehow magically transform it into an overnight wonder (highly unikely, but for the purposes of discussion here, let's just assume this for the moment), I'd still have Clemens start. There's no choice. Mangini's mistake this season was to leave Chad at the starting position approximately 2-3 games longer than he should have. Why did he do this? Because it was Chad Pennington we're talking about. Chad's loyalty and devotion to the team earned him the right to stay in long after any other non-"Mangini Guy" would have been benched. Mangini gave him more than the benefit of the doubt, he gave him the season to tank. So this tells us that benching Chad was a VERY painful decision for Mangini to make. He had quite a bit of consternation doing this (as well he should have had), which also tells us he knew that once the decision was made, it would be irreversable. There is no way we go back to Chad Pennington as our starter, even if he excels in camp. He's now an excellent backup and mentor for us, albeit an expensive one.
Hold it 227, hold it. We're going around in circles here. If Clemmens starts the season for us and gets off to a bad start, lets say 3 or 4 bad games, everyone will be clamouring for him to be replaced. It will be a carbon copy of this year again. We all know that if we re-tool the O line and Clemens struggles he is a dead man walking. I hope I'm wrong but I didn't see anything from him in the games he played to suggest he's the "man". He better get off to a fast start.
When the season ended I was giving some serious thought to the Jets drafting a first round QB. After thinking about it for awhile I have realized that would be a big mistake. We need to see what Clemens could do with a semi fuctional offense to play with. This offseason should be about doing whatever it takes for Clemens to reach his potential. Get him an OL that wont get him killed and get him some playmakers to work with, then we'll see what we have in Clemens. If he fails we'll be right back in the top 5 and we can get our QB then..
This is a great point. Because of Loyalty Mangini made a decision regarding Chad that was not in his nor the teams best interest. Chad should have never come back after the Ravens game. He came back to prolong the inevitable benching that was coming at some point this season. The difference between Chad and Vinny was Vinny knew his time was up and bowed out gracefully. Mangini learned a hard lesson that might eventually cost him his job. He went against his own principles and started Chad even though Clemens played better than him in camp. Now we have one big Qb Mess!
You say it was because of loyalty, but that is not what Mangini says. It is funny how you seem to know so much about the decision they make while all the time not coming withing a mile of those making the decisions. Mangini stuck with Chad because at the time he gave the team the best chance to win. When we no longer had a shot at anything he put in Clemens so he could get some experience - not so that he could save the franchise. Feel free to disagree with his decision, but lets not put words in his mouth that did not exist. He never came out and said, gee, we like Chad and we are going to extend our loyalty to him. He said he felt Chad gave the team the best chance to win. Turns out the big ol mess we have is on the OL because neither QB was effective. Horse of another color if you ask me.
This is revisionist history as well. Chad stepped up in big games to even get us into the playoffs in 2002, had us at 5-0 to start 2004 including a win at SD, won there in the playoffs on the road with his shoulder in need of surgery. He played reasonably well last year at New England, New England is just a better team--and even with that we won up there during the season with Chad. The further you go in the playoffs the better teams you face, that's why only one team emerges at the end.
I think the Brick words will come back to bite you big time. To use Randy Crosses words Brick is semi-decent
Yes, but there's a difference between running into a better team and having the loss be largely because the QB crumbles. Chad crumbled in the second half against the Raiders. He was ineffective for the entire game against the Steelers. He took an under-manned team's effort against the Pats in 2006 and threw it away on a rookie mistake. We've all seen Chad pale and agitated when things went against the Jets against a superior team. We've all seen him with the deer in the headlights look. This has been true every year that he has played for the Jets. It was true in the opener against Kansas City in 2005 before things went irreversibly south. Chad hadn't gotten hurt that game, and yet he looked absolutely shell-shocked after the Chiefs first two TD's went bang-bang at him in the 1st quarter. He's done that his entire career. If the Jets get down early it's over. We need to find somebody who can take a little heat without crumbling.
The O-Line is a whole other disaster that has to be addressed. An easier one than the Qb situation. At not point does Chad Pennington give the Jets a chance to beat the Pats, Colts, Jaguars, Steelers or Chargers when it matters. He can't even go 1-1 v.s. the Bills with all his Moxy, field smarts and Veteran leadership!
If you just isolate the worst moments of someone's career and conveniently leave out the rest, you can build a case against anybody. Personally, after everything the guy has been through, I don't think a 10-0 deficit is that big a deal to Chad Pennington these days. If your gameplan is to constantly fall way behind and hope your QB can furiously rally you back, you're probably not going very far anyway.
The problem is a successful Qb will be judged by what he does when it matters and he has sold us out more often than not. The sad thing is Tony Romo can be a great Regular season Qb but at the end of the day he is going to be run out of Dallas if he does not perform well in the playoffs in the next few years.
I love how you take one man's opinion and treat it as gospel. You're going to be quoting Randy Cross til Brick retires...lol.
Chad has never been able to rally the Jets from any kind of deficit. He has like 1 or 2 wins in his career when the Jets were down at least 9 points at some point. For comparison, Vinny went 8-17 over a period of just 3 years as Jet's starter when the Jets were down 9+ at some point. Chad was something like 1-14 in that situation going into last season. I did a thread on this about a year ago where I listed out the applicable games and I think the win was against the Texans in 2003, although I might be wrong. Vinny could dig the Jets out of almost any hole. Chad has just kind of been a keep the earth level kind of tamper. Any hole opens up and he disappears from sight pretty quickly.
Once again, if your plan is to dig a deep hole and rely on one guy to get you out of it we're in trouble. Most of the time Chad's been here we've not gotten down that far, in the cases we have it's usually been a total team blowout where Jesus himself wouldn't rally us back. I don't know who you thought was going to win that KC opener when the Chiefs were walking up and down the field against our defense. The Raider game was 10-10 late in the 3rd quarter, it wasn't Chad alone who gave up 20 points. Which, by the way, is funny you mention that game. The same people who want to give Kellen Clemens 4-5 years to get the hang of it also want to crucify Chad for that game, which was his first year playing. The game was in the second round of the playoffs, on the road against the team that ended up in the Super Bowl. He could have played better, but if we're going to give Clemens a third year to "get his feet wet", "make progress" and "learn the ropes" then you people who are saying that need to stop bitching about Chad in that Oakland game. You can't have it both ways. I loved Vinny, and his comebacks were great, but we were also at our best with him when we weren't digging deep holes. That's not how you win on any kind of regular basis and it's not up to one guy to bring us back. If your defense can't get you the ball back for 10 minutes at a time, like the NE playoff game last year, there's only so much a QB can do.
I strongly disagree with this sentence. Clemens had a decent camp but I don't think anyone would agree that "Clemens played better than Chad." In fact, quite the contrary. After everything was said and done, Chad definitely gave us the best chances of winning on opening day, which is why Mangini was right in starting him. The whole thing became unravelled after we discovered we had several Pillsbury Dough Boys on the offensive line. By the time we realized we weren't going to fix that anytime soon, the tanking had already gathered momentum.
