The writing was already on the wall after he gave a somberly toned mid-season press conference five days ago. Now, the writing spells out a fully legible eight-letter word: “Farewell.”
Joe Douglas‘s tenure as the New York Jets’ general manager has come to an end.
Or at least, it should. We shall see whether Jets owner Woody Johnson pulls the trigger come January, but after the Jets’ latest completely predictable letdown following a big victory with extended rest, Douglas has reached a point of no return.
Defenders of Douglas will claim that he built “the most talented Jets team in decades,” and that this team’s failure falls on player execution and coaching.
To that I reply… what exactly is “talent”? May I ask what talent is intended to produce?
Oh, right… victories. And, boy, does Douglas not have too many of those things.
This is Douglas’s fifth full season as the Jets’ general manager, and he boasts a sparkling record of 23-53. That’s a win percentage of .303, or about 5 wins per 17-game season. He is on track for his fifth consecutive season of 7 wins or fewer, barring a miracle.
Is “talent” truly “talent” if there are no wins to show for it? Those who claim this Jets team is “talented” are confusing “talent” for “name recognition.” Talented players do things that are conducive to winning, not selling jerseys.
Douglas has cycled through three different head coaches (including interim head coach Jeff Ulbrich) and four different offensive play callers (including interim play caller Todd Downing). Each one of them has yielded the same results. At what point is Douglas the constant here?
No, he hasn’t exactly had a murderer’s row of coaches – although that is largely his fault, as he hired Robert Saleh – but do we really think Sean McVay, Dan Campbell, or Andy Reid would have made it work with the teams Douglas has built? Perhaps those coaches would add a win here or there, but the Douglas-led Jets have been so far from even a wild card berth that it is preposterous to suggest they are a head coach or an offensive coordinator away from being title contenders. Their rosters simply have not been strong enough.
Yes, the Jets’ 2024 roster looked sublime on paper entering the season. In the offseason, Douglas made just about every move fans clamored for. It would be foolish to sit here and say Douglas didn’t earn rave reviews for his performance in the 2024 offseason. I was one of many people praising him. It felt like he had the team in a position to compete for a championship, even if it took him a year or two longer than you would prefer.
But that was all projection. In the NFL, you’re graded on results.
Here is a hypothetical isolated example that can be projected over the course of Douglas’s entire tenure. Say a team with a late-first round pick nabs a player who is labeled a “steal” and an “A+ pick” on draft day. “What a pick,” the pundits exclaim at 11:30 p.m. on draft night. Then, the player ends up being a bust who is out of the league in two years – not because of injuries or off-field struggles, just because he stinks.
Is that a good pick just because it seemed good when it was made? No, not at all.
That is an encapsulation of Douglas’s tenure. He’s done a lot of things that seemed well-reasoned at the time. His process has seemed competent; he doesn’t do many things that are labeled “bone-headed” at the time. But it’s never translated to results. And when you’re a general manager, the results trump the process, especially over a sample size as large as Douglas’s. It does not matter how smart a move looked at the time if it does not amount to anything on the field.
This inclination to excuse GMs from their results because of a seemingly sound process stems from our collective arrogance as football observers. We like to grade moves at the moment they are made under the misguided impression that we have an idea of what it is likely to happen, as if there is such a thing as discerning a “good” move from a “bad” move before anything happens on the field. But nobody knows a darn thing about the future. So why should it matter how smart a move looked at the time? All that matters is the outcome. Douglas does not produce positive outcomes.
Perhaps for one or two years, it was fine to give Douglas the excuses of injuries, poor quarterbacking, or whatever other misfortune could have masked his seemingly sound process. Through five years, though, this isn’t about misfortune or luck anymore. Sound as Douglas’s moves may appear when they are made, the results are never there, and enough is enough after a half-decade of it.
Now that we are 10 games into 2024, it is fair to start admitting our mistakes and acknowledge that it is a fallacy to claim Douglas should be praised for constructing a Super Bowl-caliber roster this year. What he actually did was miss on so many important draft picks and free agent signings over his first three years that he had to try and salvage the team by succumbing to big-name players on their last hurrah.
This made the roster seem appealing on paper, but at this point, it is obvious that players like Aaron Rodgers, Tyron Smith, Morgan Moses, Haason Reddick, and Davante Adams are nowhere near as “talented” as they seem when you hear their names. There is a reason the Jets were able to amass so many of these players without much difficulty. They weren’t master strokes by Douglas; he was just getting diminished veterans for market value.
The Jets wouldn’t have to rely on these types of players if Douglas drafted or signed young cornerstones at quarterback, left tackle, right tackle, WR2, and so on, but he continuously failed to do those things, forcing the Jets to roll the dice on numerous brand-name players and pray they had any gas left in the tank. They came up empty on just about every roll.
So, sure, Douglas did what many of us wanted him to do this offseason, and he did what many of us wanted him to do when he decided to go get Aaron Rodgers. But what many of us wanted him to do – while exciting and presenting a high ceiling – was never a safe pathway by any means. It was a high-reward, extremely-high-risk option that became the last resort after Douglas failed to build a sustained model for success by drafting-and-developing (or signing) a core of reliable homegrown players.
Look at the NFL’s current model organizations, such as Detroit, Baltimore, and Kansas City. They have a pipeline of quality young talent at nearly every position across the roster, which is a product of consistently great drafting and savvy value buys on the free agent market. Someone gets hurt, someone steps up. One side of the ball struggles, the other side of the ball has their back. That is the path to consistent year-over-year winning in the NFL.
If you can’t build a team in that fashion, you have to try and salvage it with moves like the ones the Jets had to make over the last two years. Sometimes the all-in approach works (2020 Bucs), sometimes it doesn’t (2011 Eagles). It did not work for the 2024 Jets, and the general manager must pay for it. Not because this particular team failed, but because his own shortcomings over his three full offseasons prior to the addition of Rodgers are the reason they ended up in this quandary in the first place.
More damning for Douglas is the fact that he has not even shown he is a good “all-in” general manager. Since the Jets have shifted to all-in mode, Douglas has done a poor job of supplementing the mentality. The effort was somewhat there in 2024 (sans the results), but it was inexcusably non-existent in 2023.
Douglas completely ignored upgrading the offensive line or adding a backup quarterback, two fireable offenses that cost the Jets their season. The Jets could have made something out of the 2023 season while their defense was still at full strength, but they wasted the opportunity due solely to Douglas’s inexplicable negligence on offense.
Speaking of the defense being at full strength in 2023, the reason it is no longer there in 2024 is because Douglas was just as complacent with that unit as he was with the offense in 2023. Despite the Jets going all-in, Douglas allowed three of the Jets’ five best pass rushers from the previous season (Bryce Huff, John Franklin-Myers, Quinton Jefferson) to leave and did little to replace them. Douglas’s primary move to replace them resulted in a ridiculous contract dispute. He did not take this unit seriously, and it resulted in the Jets’ defense undergoing an enormous decline in 2024.
Douglas tried much harder to improve the offensive line in 2024, but his additions have largely been whiffs. The unit barely looks any better than last year’s. Again, it’s nice that he made the effort, and the moves seemed sound at the time, but the results are the results. It is especially troubling because the offensive line was supposed to be Douglas’s specialty.
If they keep him, what can the Jets trust Douglas to get right in the future? Douglas could not build a sustainable enough core to prevent the Jets from stooping to the dangers of an all-in mentality, and when they did go all-in, he did a poor job of supplementing the approach.
Douglas couldn’t rebuild. Douglas couldn’t retool. What does he do well?
The Jets need a full tear-down after the 2024 season, and their general manager must be a part of that.
