Jets X-Factor’s Rivka Boord wrote a great article earlier today about how the New York Jets are paying the price for attempting to take shortcuts to success.
Many factors could lead a franchise to a position where they feel the need to take shortcuts. For the Jets, their desperation for shortcut-taking emanates from one source: Joe Douglas’s two-year draft run from 2020-21.
The Jets’ most prominent issues in 2024 can all be traced back to their general manager’s biggest draft whiffs in the first two offseasons of his tenure.
Left tackle
One of the Jets’ worst starters in 2024 has been left tackle Tyron Smith. Among left tackles, Smith ranks second in sacks allowed (5), third in pressures allowed (19), and sixth in penalties (6).
In March, the Jets signed Smith, a likely future Hall-of-Famer, to a one-year, $6.5 million deal worth up to $20 million in incentives, which can be gained through playing time. While Smith is 33 years old, he was still an elite player as recently as 2023, earning second-team All-Pro honors.
Unfortunately, the Jets just happened to sign Smith at the exact point where he hit the wall. Every athlete hits the wall at some point. Sometimes, it comes as the culmination of a gradual decline, and sometimes, it comes without warning. For Smith, it was the latter.
That is the risk you take when you rely on players well into their thirties. Even if he was a productive player in his most recent season, there is always a chance he could fall off a cliff at any point. It is not a reliable team-building strategy to count on these players, which is why it is so vital to be successful in the draft and build the core of your team with young, homegrown pieces.
Why were the Jets forced to roll the dice on Smith? Because Joe Douglas whiffed on Mekhi Becton.
Douglas’s first draft pick as a general manager was the mammoth left tackle from Louisville, chosen 11th overall in 2020. Fixing the offensive line was arguably Douglas’s biggest challenge when he took over the job, and he wasted no time making a substantial investment in the unit with his first-ever draft choice.
Becton did not pan out in New York. After a promising rookie season, his career was derailed by injuries, poor fitness, social media drama, and rapidly declining performance on the field. The Jets declined Becton’s fifth-year option and let him walk in 2024.
As a result of whiffing on Becton, the Jets were left without a left tackle entering the 2024 season. Had Douglas hit on the Becton pick, they would have been all set with a good 25-year-old left tackle going into 2024. Instead, they had a giant hole, forcing them to settle for an unreliable dice roll on an aging player.
It just goes to show that one draft pick can have a ripple effect on an organization’s future for years to come. If Douglas selected Tristan Wirfs instead of Becton back in 2020, perhaps the Jets’ all-in 2024 season with Aaron Rodgers would be going more swimmingly.
Wide receiver
The wide receiver position has been a significant problem for the Jets in 2024. Multiple players are underperforming, and Aaron Rodgers is struggling to get on the same page with anyone not named Allen Lazard.
Ultimately, the Jets are getting awful results out of Rodgers’s pass attempts to wide receivers. Rodgers has a 77.8 passer rating when targeting wide receivers, which ranks 26th out of 32 qualified quarterbacks. The only players below him are Bo Nix, Anthony Richardson, Gardner Minshew, Jacoby Brissett, Deshaun Watson, and Will Levis. Suffice it to say, that is not the type of company Rodgers wants to keep.
Douglas found a long-term starting wide receiver in the first round of the 2022 draft when he used the 10th overall pick on Garrett Wilson. However, Wilson remains the only quality addition Douglas has made at the wide receiver position. Outside of Wilson, the Jets have been cycling through veteran receivers who were cast aside by their previous teams.
In 2021, Douglas signed Corey Davis after a breakout season in Tennessee. The Davis signing was a flop, as he dealt with injuries and a large drop-off in production until he abruptly retired in the 2023 offseason.
In 2023, Douglas signed Allen Lazard to complement Wilson. Lazard had an atrocious 2023 season that resulted in him being benched in the middle of the season. Douglas also added Randall Cobb to round out the unit; Cobb finished the year with 39 receiving yards in 11 games.
The 2024 season has seen the Jets add even more cast-off veteran receivers who are not performing up to expectations. Douglas’s next attempt to find a quality No. 2 receiver in free agency was Mike Williams, a 30-year-old who was coming off an ACL tear. Through seven games, Williams has 11 receptions for 160 yards and no touchdowns, while his name is coming up in trade rumors.
Following Week 6, the Jets traded for a 32-year-old Davante Adams after he missed three games with a hamstring injury. Adams looked sluggish in his Jets debut, catching 3-of-9 targets for 30 yards. Obviously, there is still plenty of time for him to turn things around, but that wasn’t a promising start. It is not ideal to be relying on a 32-year-old receiver to save your season, especially one who has seen his receiving yards per game decline for four consecutive seasons since he peaked in 2020.
Similar to their reliance on Tyron Smith, the Jets’ reliance on all of these cast-off receivers can be tracked back to Douglas’s failure to find young, homegrown solutions in his first two drafts.
After taking Becton in the first round of the 2020 draft, Douglas followed up with Baylor wide receiver Denzel Mims in the second round. Mims never scored a touchdown with the Jets and was traded before the start of his fourth season.
Douglas took another dip into the second-round receiver pool in 2021, selecting Mississippi’s Elijah Moore. After a strong rookie year, Moore declined significantly in 2022, leading to an argument with offensive coordinator Mike LaFleur and an ensuing benching. Moore never found his rhythm in New York and was traded to Cleveland in the 2023 offseason.
Right now, the Jets’ wide receiver core is supposed to be made up of three homegrown studs. Instead, because of Douglas’s colossal whiffs on Mims and Moore, he has been forced to continuously gamble on veteran free agents whose previous teams did not seem perturbed to lose them. That leaves the Jets in their current position, where their wide receiver unit features one good homegrown player and a hodgepodge of veterans who are past their primes and not clicking as a unit.
Quarterback
Last but not least, we have the centerpiece of it all.
Every fan and analyst will give you a different number to represent the percentage of blame they believe Aaron Rodgers deserves for the Jets’ 2-5 start. While those answers may range from 10% to 100%, nobody can claim that Rodgers has played zero part in the Jets’ struggles – or that his struggles are all that surprising.
Take the flashy name “Aaron Rodgers” out of the equation for just a moment, and look at the facts of the situation. The Jets are relying on a 40-year-old quarterback (soon to be 41) who is coming off an Achilles injury. In his most recent full season before the injury, that quarterback produced mediocre passing numbers (15th in passer rating, 23rd in yards per attempt, 23rd in EPA per dropback) on his way to an 8-9 season. That trajectory would suggest the Jets are due to get well below-average results from that quarterback in 2024, and that’s exactly what they’ve gotten.
Out of 32 qualified quarterbacks, Rodgers ranks 24th in passer rating (82.2), 26th in yards per attempt (6.2), and 22nd in EPA per dropback (-0.08). All three marks are career lows.
The hope was that Rodgers would improve upon his 2022 production on a Jets team with a supporting cast that was perceived as far stronger than that of the 2022 Packers. However, due largely to the two positions we discussed previously, the Jets’ supporting cast has not been the improvement that many thought it would. Couple that with a clearly weaker coaching staff, and the Jets’ overall support system around Rodgers is arguably worse than the 2022 Packers. Add two more years of aging and an Achilles injury, and you get Rodgers’s top 22-26 rankings in key passing categories.
Although Rodgers offered a tantalizingly high ceiling for the Jets (and still does – he has a chance to turn this thing around), it is never ideal to rely on this type of quarterback. Even before his Achilles injury, Rodgers had taken a significant decline in his most recent season and was going on 40 years old. In the best-case (realistic) scenario where he did get back to playing at a top 6-10 level, he would still only offer the Jets a short championship window due to his age.
Going “all-in” to win the Super Bowl with a veteran quarterback rarely works.
Tom Brady pulled it off, but he’s Tom Brady. Rodgers might be a more talented and productive passer than Brady, but it is clear by now that Rodgers is not in Brady’s stratosphere when it comes to facilitating championship opportunities.
The Matthew Stafford-Rams comparison works in some ways, but Stafford was only 33 in his first Rams season. He offered the Rams far more potential longevity than Rodgers offers the Jets. Even Peyton Manning was still only 36 when he joined the Broncos.
The best path to winning a championship is to find a young franchise quarterback who can give you continuous bites at the apple for a long, long time. Douglas tried to bring that quarterback to New York. He failed miserably.
When Douglas chose Zach Wilson with the second overall pick in the 2021 draft, it was widely agreed that Douglas’s tenure would be defined by the outcome of that selection. Above anything else, owners hire general managers to find and develop franchise quarterbacks.
It only took two years for the Wilson pick to fail. Wilson was benched multiple times in his second season, costing the Jets numerous victories in low-scoring games where their defense played excellently.
Most general managers would be canned for whiffing that badly on a franchise quarterback, but Douglas got a mulligan due to his fantastic 2022 draft class. That class placed a brighter spotlight on Wilson’s struggles, since it accelerated the Jets’ competitive window and thus created more opportunities for Wilson to look like the culprit for losses.
Because of the Jets’ belief that they had a championship-ready roster outside of the QB position, Douglas was retained, and the Jets entered the 2023 offseason seeking to abandon their development of Wilson and turn the keys over to a veteran quarterback who could maximize the roster they had.
The most likely solution was Derek Carr, but after a fateful darkness retreat changed the mind of a four-time MVP who claimed he was “90%” on the way to retiring, the Jets had a golden opportunity fall into their laps. They let Carr walk and moved onto Rodgers.
Carr, a consistently average quarterback who went 9-8 with New Orleans last season, could’ve conceivably gotten the Jets to 9 or 10 wins per year if their supporting cast remained as strong as it looked in 2022 and 2023. However, as we discussed earlier, the supporting cast in 2024 has not been as strong as expected. They were never going to win a Super Bowl with Carr, anyway. Rodgers at least offered a semblance of hope that a Super Bowl was possible, even if his floor was lower than Carr’s.
Regardless of whether the Jets added Carr or Rodgers, they’d be in the same place right now. Whiffing on the franchise quarterback put the Jets in a no-win situation.
Douglas was given a second chance despite botching the single most critical move of his tenure. Yet, three years later, that move is the primary reason why this team finds itself in its current predicament.
If Douglas hit on the Wilson pick, the Jets would have made some noise with the window they had from 2022-23 while the defense was still playing at an elite level and the team was only two-to-three low-scoring wins away from making the playoffs each year. At the present moment, they’d have a dynamic franchise quarterback who could lift the team up out of any dire situation, and keep them competitive for years to come.
Look at how Josh Allen gives his team a chance every year, no matter how much turnover occurs throughout the roster. If the Jets entered a season having traded their best receiver and relying on second-round rookie Keon Coleman as their top guy, they’d be panned, and it’d be blamed as a reason for the QB’s struggles. But Allen doesn’t make any excuses. He just goes out there to continue dominating and winning games, no matter how dire the roster situation might look on paper. Because that’s what a franchise-lifting quarterback does, and the Jets do not have one.
Instead, the Jets’ lack of a franchise-lifting quarterback is exacerbating the issues surrounding the quarterback position. While Rodgers was once that caliber of quarterback, he is no longer at the level where he can elevate his supporting cast. He can still be a great game manager if the situation around him is ideal, but it isn’t right now, resulting in the colossal mess we are all witnessing.
But the situation around the quarterback might be a lot better right now if the Wilson pick worked out. Rodgers is to blame for a lot of the issues around him, as his cronies are at the core of the Jets’ offensive struggles.
Without Rodgers, the Jets probably would have hired a better offensive coordinator than Nathaniel Hackett, and they probably would be running a more modernized offense that isn’t constricted by Rodgers’s archaic preferences. A different offensive coordinator also could have built a better offensive staff than the current one, which features the widely disliked Keith Carter as the offensive line coach.
Without Rodgers, the Jets probably would not have suffered from Allen Lazard’s horrible 2023 season in which his putrid play contributed to multiple close losses. Lazard is playing better this season, but he is still second in the NFL with six drops, putting him on pace for an unacceptable 15 drops for the year. They also wasted a ton of useless reps on Rodgers’s buddy Randall Cobb in 2023, and time will tell if Adams does enough to be worth losing the future third-round pick that the Jets could have used to dig themselves out of this mess that Rodgers helped start.
It all stems from missing on Zach Wilson.
The Jets would be in a fantastic spot right now if the Wilson pick worked out. Not only that, but if Wilson turned out to be a star, the Jets may have had realistic chances at making deep playoff runs in 2022 and 2023. Instead, they wasted the 2022 and 2023 seasons, and they now find themselves suffering the repercussions of putting all their chips in on a quarterback who was drafted when his RB2 was one year old.
Even Wilson’s failures can be traced back to Douglas’s 2020 and 2021 drafts. Maybe Wilson was always destined to fail (that might be the case based on his current third-string status and the lowly trade compensation he commanded), but if Douglas gave Wilson better support than the likes of players such as Mekhi Becton, Denzel Mims, Elijah Moore, Michael Carter, and La’Mical Perine, then maybe Wilson would have gotten off to a faster start, setting a stronger foundation for his development.
One of Douglas’s worst crimes over that span was when he completely wasted a 2020 fourth-round pick (125th overall) on quarterback James Morgan, who never played for the Jets and is now in the CFL. Later in the same round, productive offensive starters like WR Gabriel Davis, G Kevin Dotson, and C Tyler Biadasz were chosen.
Choosing a developmental quarterback wasn’t a bad idea, but Douglas reached with Morgan, a fifth-year starter who transferred to Florida International from Bowling Green and threw for a measly 14 touchdowns in 13 starts during his last season.
There are three quality starting quarterbacks in 2024 who were chosen on Day 3 of the draft: Dak Prescott, Kirk Cousins, and Brock Purdy. So, there was a small chance that Douglas could’ve given the Jets a second shot at a franchise quarterback behind Wilson, but Douglas picked someone who hardly seemed worthy of being drafted at all, let alone in the fourth round. At the very least, a fourth-round quarterback could have developed into a better backup option than Wilson ended up being in 2023, but Morgan gave them nothing. It was a total waste of a pick in a draft that was crucial for setting the team’s foundation over the next five seasons.
Everyone in the world wants to point fingers at Aaron Rodgers, Tyron Smith, Davante Adams, and many other Jets players for their underwhelming performances – and rightfully so. But at the end of the day, the Jets are failing because they are relying on the wrong players. No QB-LT-WR combo that combines for 105 years of age should be asked to anchor a team with Super Bowl aspirations.
The only reason that is transpiring is because Joe Douglas failed to draft cornerstone players at those positions in 2020 and 2021.
