With all the hockey hullabaloo down in Boston, we’ve been fairly distracted from football so far this season. The drama unfolding on Causeway Street was just too riveting (in a gut-wrenching, looming nightmare scenario kind of way) for us to pull our eyes away for more than a few minutes at a time. Now that Bruins goalkeeper Jeremy Swayman has inked his (very fair) deal, and the pipes are once again secure at TD Garden, we thought it was time to check in with another drama-filled situation a few hours south of Foxborough that has been percolating for a while, but now seems ready to come to a head. Here are our Quarterseason Notes: New York Jets edition.
The Jets are, once again, Jetting. When the problem is their coach, they blame the quarterback. When the problem is their quarterback, they blame the coach. The Jets’ real problem is their owner, and the fact that their front office genuinely has no idea how to identify what is actually wrong with their team at any given time.
Exhibit A: Betting the farm on Aaron Rodgers. We were told that this was the most blockbuster trade in modern NFL history, that Rodgers would do for the Jets what Tom Brady did for the Buccaneers, and that the Jets were certainly favorites to win the Super Bowl now that first ballot Hall of Famer Rodgers was in charge of their offense. Instead, Rodgers has proceeded to: load up the offensive roster with aging faves, demand Nathaniel Hackett as his OC, skip various preseason events to get high (nothing wrong with the latter, but not a great idea if its at the expense of the former), and tear his Achilles three snaps into his tenure. Since bum hamstrings – of which Rodgers has not one, but two – are a canary in the Achilles coal mine, this shouldn’t have been as much of a surprise as it was to the New York sports media.
The Jets had a young, springy quarterback that had “rookie suckage” written all over him, but who was also slowly but surely improving. Now they have a 40 year old with two bad hamstrings, a stiff, mobility-limiting Achilles tendon (with another on deck just waiting for the right moment to snap), a sprained ankle, and who thinks he is above listening to his head coach, even though they have the same number of Super Bowl rings.
Which brings us to Exhibit B: Aaron Rodgers vs. Robert Saleh. Despite all of the above, the sports media still insists on trying to pin the team’s most recent failures on head coach Robert Saleh. Saleh has been the first Jets coach in nearly fifteen years to assemble a truly outstanding defense. He has kept them in games no matter which quarterback they drop into his lap, and he has presided over two of their best draft cycles in more than a decade. In addition, as one of the architects of the Seattle Seahawks’ legendary Legion of Boom, Saleh won a Super Bowl ring as the Seahawks Quality Control Coach.
One Super Bowl ring, by the way, is exactly how many Aaron Rodgers has won. Despite the media’s insistence on treating Rodgers like Tom Brady and Robert Saleh like Zac Taylor, they have won the exact same number of championships. And Saleh’s was more recent. The Jets, however, have handed the keys to this jalopy over to Rodgers and have empowered him to ignore, dismiss, and disrespect his head coach. No matter how great Rodgers’s individual stats have been throughout his career – and he is indisputably a first ballot Hall of Famer – he is simply not Tom Brady. His ability to engineer game-winning drives (in our opinion, a highly overlooked and underrated quarterback statistic, more on this below) has always fallen far short of TB12’s and he won his only Super Bowl ring nearly fifteen years ago. The Jets most recent loss was to Sam Darnold’s Vikings in London, a game in which Rodgers threw three interceptions, including a pick-six, and sprained his ankle. Darnold didn’t even look particularly good, and the Vikings still won. Yet, despite Rodgers’s clear under-performance, the Jets are on the verge of firing the first head coach who has made them relevant in more than ten years.
The Jets very publicly made Rodgers the face of their offense. Pictures were run in the media of him on the sidelines during practice wearing headsets. Stories were breathlessly told of how he was “like a coach out on the field” (which is exactly what they said about Brady except, in his case, it was true). There was a consensus that Rodgers had a “commitment to winning,” super high standards of excellence, and would surely turn their offense around. With his old friend Allen Lazard serving as Rodgers’s Gronkowski-style security blanket and Nathaniel Hackett calling the plays, the Jets were crowned Super Bowl Favorites.
We have no idea why so many people in the NY media establishment actually believed any of this. In Rodgers’s entire career to date, he has had twenty-one 4th quarter comebacks and thirty-two game winning drives during the regular season. Not bad, but in the post-season, its far worse: he has had exactly one 4th quarter comeback and two game winning drives. Contrast these numbers with Tom Brady’s. Over the course of his career, TB12 had forty-six fourth quarter comebacks and fifty-eight game winning drives during the regular season. In the postseason, Brady has had nine fourth quarter comebacks and fourteen game winning drives.
Let the enormity of that difference sink in. In the post-season, Brady had nine 4th quarter comebacks and fourteen game winning drives. Rodgers has had one 4th quarter comeback and two game winning drives. Individual stats are great, but Brady’s ability to win games both during the regular season and in the post-season clutch, when the pressure is really on, simply dwarfs Aaron Rodgers’s. And yet, the Jets believed that Rodgers could do for them what Brady did for the Buccaneers. Now they are doubling down on that decision and fixing to fire the one guy who has actually managed to keep them in games. The NY sports media, predictably, continues to talk about them as if these losses are confusing and inexplicable.
The Jets are, indeed, Jetting once again.
If the Jets are serious about firing Robert Saleh, we sure wouldn’t mind the Patriots shipping him up to Boston to run their defense. But we suspect Saleh would find another head coaching job in the blink of an eye.
[photo of Robert Saleh courtesy of All-Pro Reels from District of Columbia, USA – _K0A7477, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=97701763]