Question #126: Is this the right move?
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- December
- 29
The Jets just fired Eric Mangini. He didn’t even last 24 hours from his/their last loss and playoff elimination, despite a second winning record in three years as head coach.
I’m not defending Mangini, especially this year, which included a woeful collapse and followed a dreadful ‘07. I’m not defending anybody, though, including Mike Tannenbaum the GM, and especially Brett Favre.
But I will say this: When you rip up the whole thing—and Tannenbaum has to go now, too, right?—you risk that it will get worse, maybe much worse, before it gets better. And that it’s truly hard to judge a coach when he’s had no stability at the quarterback position. He went with an unproven, not-ready backup most of last year, and an injured over-the-hill old guy this year.
If Mangini had had Eli Manning or Matt Cassel or Matt Ryan or Joe Flacco, or somebody even better than those guys, do you think he’d be fired today? Do you think the Jets—a team I said at the beginning, even with Favre, even with Tom Brady down in New England, wasn’t good enough—would not have won one of those pathetic west coast losses with a better QB? And then they’d be prepping for the playoffs instead of firing the coach the minute the owner gets back to his desk on Monday.
So now Woody Johnson has to show us if he has any football acumen at all, if he’s smart enough to get the right guy in to replace Mangini (it’s possible he already has his guy, hence the quick firing of Mangenius; maybe he’s already spoken to Bill Cowher). And Johnson and whomever he picks have to find a way to get Cassel or a franchise-ready quarterback. And a backup QB.
The coach goes nowhere without the QB and the backup. Mangini, for all his faults and his oddball Belichickian personality, never had a shot without one.
The Jets are the Mets of football. All the right intentions but the worst possible people in all the wrong places. If these guys were in charge of flying you from Kennedy to Newark, they’d fly you through the Artic before finally figuring out they were headed in the wrong direction. These people would make the people who fouled up the economy look like nobel prize winning economists. I don’t know which is worse… having a football team forever on the fringe looking in or just being outright awful and having no place to go but up (see Detroit Lions). Hard to believe there are 7 probowlers coming from the Jets. They should think about just blowing it off and keeping their sorry faces out of the limelight so the commentators don’t make fun of them during the entire first half of the pro bowl. That should be comical. Tannenbaum should be the first to go. Mangini (while not the coach we thought he’d be) wasn’t completely at fault and shouldn’t be the one holding the bag of dog poop at the end of the long walk. That noble distinction lands on Tannenbaum for putting this wonderful team together in the first place. And he should be rewarded accordingly… with a red carpet ride straight to the unemployment line. This team is going to take another 5-10 years to get good. And it’ll take even longer if they don’t fire Tannenbutt.
go green.