There are a lot of good things happening with the Jets, even still six months away from them playing a game that counts. But they made a smart move in hiring Aaron Glenn, a Bill Parcells guy, to be their coach, and what could turn out to be a great move in signing Justin Fields to be their quarterback, something that indicates that they might be out of the savior business with their quarterbacks once and for all.
The very best thing about the Jets right now, though, if you’re a Jets fan, is this:
The Jets aren’t the Giants.
Can I tell you for sure that Glenn, an old Jet, is finally going to turn things around for the first time since Rex Ryan was coach? I can’t. But I believe that he will, just off the work we saw from him last season with the Lions defense, when it looked as if he was pulling guys out of the parking lot because of all the injuries the Lions had suffered, and still winning.
Can I further tell you that Darren Mougey, a young guy who is anything but an old Jet, can be the best general manager the team has had since Mike Tannenbaum (another Parcells guy) was in charge and they were going to two straight AFC championship games? Can’t do that with Mougey, about whom we all know little. But I trust Tannenbaum and Tannenbaum liked him and Mougey is in Mike’s old chair.
All we can really go by so far is the two big moves the firm of Mougey and Glenn has made since they’ve been in their new jobs: They showed Aaron Rodgers the door and now they have signed a 26-year-old quarterback with a ton of upside, one who will have coaches building an offense around what he can do — and not obsessing about what he can’t do — for the first time in his two-team NFL career.
These are the Jets, of course, and Woody Johnson is still the owner so no one is spiking the ball before the new guys even get to their first NFL draft. But for now, and it’s only for now, the Jets are showing a rather shocking and almost dizzying lack of dysfunction.
And this all goes on at a time when the Giants, who had bad quarterback play that goes in with any bad quarterback play they’ve had in 100 years, are not just talking to the 41-year-old Rodgers, whom the Jets no longer wanted, but also 40-year-old Joe Flacco, and Russell Wilson, who will turn 37 next season. Rodgers is three years younger than Eli Manning if you’re keeping score. Flacco is four years younger than Eli.
And guess what? They’d all give the Giants a better chance to win games next season than they did last season with Daniel Jones and Drew Lock and Tommy DeVito and Tim Boyle. There may have been others, but at some point I think I blacked out watching them. Maybe the Giants are still going to move up to take Cam Ward, or maybe they will take a shot on Deion Sanders’s kid, Shedeur. Or maybe the Giants don’t love either one of them, and in the year when they do have the No. 3 pick in the draft because of the general lousiness of last season, it will turn out to be the wrong year.
The Jets had the No. 3 pick in the draft once and used it on Sam Darnold after the Giants drafted Saquon Barkley (whatever happened to him?) right ahead of Darnold. Now Darnold, after resurrecting his career in Minnesota, effectively gets treated like a No. 1 overall pick by the Seahawks. After Darnold, the Jets — deep in the throes of Jets-like dysfunction — took Zach Wilson with the No. 2 pick.
That worked out so well that they next went after Rodgers the way Tannenbaum once went after Brett Favre, showing you back then that even one of the best general managers the Jets ever had could back the wrong horse.
Now Rodgers is in play for the Giants and Wilson is in play and Flacco is in play, in what looks like some kind of AARP draft before we get anywhere near the real one in April. We are talking about three Super Bowls with these guys, a million touchdown passes and passing yards, all the MVP awards that Rodgers won — and also a combined age of 117.
The Jets, who really weren’t looking for a savior this time, either out of Green Bay or out of the upcoming draft? They get Fields, who can throw and run, on a quite reasonable two-year deal. No one is suggesting that they have found their very own Jalen Hurts. But Fields is young, he has talent and if the Jets surround him with enough playing talent and — just as importantly — coaching help, he has a chance to be as dynamic a two-way quarterback as they’ve ever had. And that ain’t nothing.
The Bears absolutely gave up on Fields. So did Mike Tomlin last season when he took the ball away from Fields in Pittsburgh and handed it to Wilson, who looked as if he still knew what to do with it until the Steelers blew out all four tires at the end and lost their last five games and Wilson started to make you remember why Sean Payton couldn’t wait to take the ball away from him in Denver.
So often in sports, all sports, coaches absolutely do become fixed on what players can’t do as opposed to what they can. I think that has happened to Fields in both his stops. He was playing on a tomato can offense with the Bears. And it was clear last season he was just a placeholder, at least in Tomlin’s mind, with the Steelers. Maybe you’re sure that the Steelers wouldn’t have finished better than they did with Fields behind center. But I’m not.
If he develops here under the coaching of the new offensive staff, the Jets can win more games than they have since Todd Bowles was the coach and Ryan Fitzpatrick (when do the Giants give The Beard a call?) was the quarterback. Even in a 5-12 season, the Jets were in so many of the games they lost, all the way into the fourth quarter. There was clearly a lot of talent on the field, though we may have overrated it in the belief, or at least the hope, that Rodgers would be a savior, even in a season when he turned 41 and sometimes looking as if he was carrying furniture on his back when trying to escape the rush.
Maybe this will all go wrong, because things do with the Jets. But they do have a graduate of the school of Parcells coaching. They had a Parcells guy involved with the process of hiring him, and the new general manager. Maybe not the Same Old Jets, after all. Definitely not the Giants, at least not right now.
A REAL KNICK CONVERSATION STARTER (OR NOT), GIVE YOUNG YANKS A SHOT & REMEMBERING JOHN FEINSTEIN …
I’m sorry, but did Mikal Bridges and Tom Thibodeau have that conversation about playing starters less and bench players more, or not?
Thibodeau and Bridges reportedly talked this all out before Bridges made that shot to beat the Blazers.
Thibodeau, though, said the conversation never happened.
And never walked that back.
And if it never happened, he’s saying that Bridges made it up.
But why would Bridges do that?
It is a fact that the Knicks came into the weekend with the fourth-best record in the sport, the same as it is a fact that they haven’t gotten a game off the teams with the better records.
So the story here isn’t the brief dispute between Thibs and Bridges, as surprising as it was that Thibs was so plain-spoken with his denial.
No, the story with these Knicks doesn’t change:
The Knicks didn’t make the Towns trade and didn’t trade five No. 1 draft picks to get Bridges and still not make it out of the second round.
They have to figure it out.
But so, too, does the coach, despite all the ways he has helped make the Knicks matter again.
He can’t have his team get rolled by either the Cavs or Celtics in the second round, if they make it that far.
Because if they do, he could become a different kind of story.
I always love the idea that all the other teams in baseball are just dying to help the Yankees now that Gerrit Cole is lost for the season.
For the last time:
If some of the young guys on the Yankees aren’t going to get a full shot this season, when do they?
How many times can the Rangers’ season be on the brink, that’s what I’d like to know.
Some bigger program than New Mexico is going to want Richard Pitino to come coach their basketball team next season.
Finally today:
Our business lost a great writer and reporter and I lost an old friend on Thursday when it was announced that John Feinstein had died suddenly at the age of 69.
John wrote 50 books across his career, the most famous of which is still “Season on the Brink,” his massive best seller about Bob Knight.
He spent so many Sundays with us on “The Sports Reporters,” and he did golf commentary for The Golf Channel, and loved college basketball and Duke basketball most of all.
His final column, about his old friend Tom Izzo, the Michigan State coach, appeared in the paper the morning he died.
For all the books he sold and all the best sellers he had, it was fitting that he was in the Washington Post one last time.
Who he was:
John Feinstein, newspaperman.