Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. I really can’t decide which New York NFL team is more hopeless.
In today’s SI:AM:
✅ NFL picks
🏈 Why coaches matter more than ever
⚾ Yankees introduce Fried
Seriously? Madden?
Everyone knows that the New York Jets are the most dysfunctional franchise in the NFL. They’re mired in the league’s longest active playoff drought (14 seasons) and the longest active streak of losing seasons (nine years). They fired their head coach and general manager this season, and have a 41-year-old quarterback. It’s a mess.
But why are they so terrible, and why have they been that way for more than a decade? A lengthy report published Thursday morning by The Athletic makes it clear: Woody Johnson is a terrible owner.
The story, by reporters Zack Rosenblatt, Dianna Russini and Michael Silver, is an extensive account of Johnson’s counterproductive meddling in team affairs. It paints Johnson as impulsive, easily influenced and overly confident. Current and former players, coaches and executives quoted in the piece all reach the same conclusion: that Johnson is the source of the franchise’s problems and that an organizational culture change is necessary if the Jets are going to turn things around.
The most baffling aspect of the report is the apparent influence that Johnson’s teenage sons, Brick and Jack, have within the building. The article recounts two instances when Johnson referenced players’ ratings in the video game Madden in conversations about player acquisition. In one instance, Johnson stepped in to scuttle a proposed trade with the Denver Broncos for wide receiver Jerry Jeudy, allegedly citing Jeudy's mediocre Madden rating. In another, Johnson “pushed back on signing free-agent guard John Simpson due to a lackluster ‘awareness’ rating in Madden.” The Jets signed Simpson anyway, and he has started all 14 games this season. (His Madden awareness rating is now an 85, up from 52 in last year’s game.)
“When we’re discussing things, you’ll hear Woody cite something that Brick or Jack read online that’s being weighed equally against whatever opinion someone else in the department has,” one anonymous Jets executive is quoted as saying.
Plenty of sports fans are familiar with owners like Johnson—people who think their enormous wealth grants them expertise over all aspects of running a team. One of the themes of The Athletic story is Johnson’s insistence on involving himself in the on-field product, whether that’s weighing in on roster decisions or shoehorning his way into a locker room celebration. Johnson employs dozens of football experts, but he can’t resist interfering and overruling those more knowledgeable than him.
New Yorkers are particularly familiar with meddlesome owners whose wealth is derived solely from a family business they had nothing to do with. (Johnson’s money comes from the Johnson & Johnson healthcare fortune.) New York Knicks owner James Dolan, whose father founded HBO and Cablevision, was notorious for interfering in the team’s basketball operations. But Dolan has stepped back in recent years—and it has translated to success for the team. The Knicks have made the playoffs in three of the past four years.
This offseason offers an opportunity for the Jets to have a fresh start, bringing in a new coach and general manager. But the Jets have already had plenty of restarts over the past decade. The new coach will be the fourth one the team has hired since it last made the playoffs. Maybe this will be the change the franchise needs to stop being the biggest laughingstock in the league. More likely, though, the change needs to come from the top.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as SI:AM | Woody Johnson Is the Worst Type of Sports Owner.
