We hear constantly and to the point of cliché about how quarterback is the most important position in sports, especially at this time when we don’t know who is going to be QB1 for either the Giants or Jets next season. But as much as the position matters, here and everywhere and always, your quarterback better be with the right coach. All you have to do is look around.
Another reality of pro football is this: There is no more crucial partnership than the one between a head coach and his quarterback, no matter how good the coach’s offensive coordinator is.
Go back to Vince Lombardi and Bart Starr at the start of the Super Bowl era. From there you get Chuck Noll and Terry Bradshaw, Bill Walsh and Joe Montana, Jimmy Johnson and Troy Aikman and then and of course, Bill Belichick and Tom Brady. After Brady won one more Super Bowl with the Bucs, there was this notion that it was all him in New England, as if Belichick was just along for the ride. Come on. You think Peyton Manning wouldn’t have wanted to trade places with Brady?
You know who Jets fans want in the worst way, every bit as much as they want a star quarterback? They want Andy Reid, who made it to a Super Bowl in Philly even before he got with the great Patrick Mahomes, even if Reid’s Eagles lost to Belichick and Brady when they got there.
Jets fans want Dan Campbell. Or Dan Quinn. They want Sean McVay, who’s already been to Super Bowls with both his guy, Matthew Stafford, and with Campbell’s guy, Jared Goff. They want John Harbaugh, who won the big game with Joe Flacco and now is trying to finally do the same with Lamar Jackson. For all the heat that Nick Sirianni takes in Philly now, the guy is in the playoffs every year, and probably would have won the Super Bowl against Reid and Mahomes except for a bad defensive holding call at the end.
John Mara thinks he got it right when he basically rehired Joe (Hard Knocks) Schoen and Brian Daboll. We’ll see about that next season, Mara’s patience having nearly run out and all. Now Woody Johnson and yet another new Jets generally manager absolutely need to get it right with the next Jets coach, one who will get his chance to become the kind of culture changer that someone like Campbell has been in Detroit, where the Lions are now a favorite to finally make it to a Super Bowl. The kind of culture changer Quinn immediately became in Washington.
I was talking with Ernie Accorsi, a lifer as a front office guy in pro football, about general managers and coaches in the NFL one time, and Ernie simply said:
“Believe me, I have all the respect in the world for anyone with a job like mine. But I’m smart enough to know that in the end, it’s a coach’s game.”
Nobody would ever dismiss the men who assemble the rosters. Looking at just the work that someone like Ben Johnson has done as Campbell’s offensive coordinator and the work that Joe Brady is doing with Josh Allen in Buffalo. And anybody who follows the league knows that defensive coordinators like Steve Spagnuolo and Vic Fangio come across as the top sergeants of the league.
Go ahead and try any of it without the right coach. They can come in hot, the way Campbell did, famously saying, “We’re going to bite a kneecap off.” Or they can win six Super Bowls the way Belichick did in New England with the coach not saying anything more memorable than “On to Cincinnati.”
Here are the coaches the Giants have hired since Tom Coughlin: Ben McAdoo, Joe Judge, Pat Shurmur, Daboll. McAdoo made the playoffs with Eli Manning, before the Giants promptly got rolled by the Packers. Daboll won a playoff game with Daniel Jones, then got rolled by the Eagles the very next week.
Since Rex Ryan took the Jets to two straight AFC championship games (managing to do that with Mark Sanchez as his quarterback) they’ve had Todd Bowles, Adam Gase, Robert Saleh, Jeff Ulbrich. At least Bowles is now in a place, Tampa, where everybody in the organization is rowing in the same direction. It never happens with the Jets.
Any fan of either the Jets or the Giants has to look with envy at the quarterbacks who have games this weekend: Mahomes, Allen, Jackson, Stafford, Goff, Hurts, Jayden Daniels, C.J. Stroud. But they should be looking just as enviously at Reid and Campbell and McVay. You know who else might be fast-tracking his way into this conversation? DeMeco Ryans of the Texans.
By the way? This can’t be about how the men the Jets are considering right now are coming across in interviews that are so often nothing more than performance art. In the modern world of the NFL, some of these coaching candidates are the ones getting coached hard themselves for interviews like these.
After John Mara hired Judge, he gushed about “as impressive a coaching interview as I’ve ever been a part of.” It was on a day when Mara also spoke of Judge’s “poise, confidence, presence, leadership qualities.” Well, there you have it. It wasn’t too terribly long after that when Mara was talking about how embarrassed he was by the Giants and fired Judge.
Mara didn’t fire his coach this time, despite a season every bit as embarrassing as he saw from Judge’s Giants in 2021. The Jets fired a coach this season, a general manager, an offensive coordinator, kind of a world’s record. Now Woody Johnson talks bravely about the Jets finally getting things right. Not without the right coach they don’t. They obsess over there in Florham Park about finding another Namath. What they need to find first is another Bill Parcells.