Joe Douglas had to go. In five-plus seasons as the New York Jets general manager, his rosters put together a 30-64 record. His teams never won more than seven games.
There were extenuating circumstances, of course. His first head coach was Adam Gase, a man constructed solely of Monster energy drinks and pizza grease who coached up to his constitution. Zach Wilson was incredible throwing Pro Day passes against theoretical defenses and genuinely horrible against actual humans. Aaron Rodgers tore his Achilles four snaps into his 2023 season and saw the defense behind him collapse in 2024.
These were all things Douglas should have had the foresight or authority to correct. He did not, and now the Jets will almost certainly extend the longest postseason drought in major men’s professional sports. So, 11 weeks into a 3-8 campaign, he was fired.
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This will change nothing for a team that alternates between betting on high risk quick fixes and sitting on potential long-term solutions long after they’ve become untenable. The Jets remain a team with a below average quarterback who turns 41 in two weeks. Their defense is less than the sum of its parts. New York is less a franchise than a ravenous black hole consuming all light that attempts to grace its boundary.
A knee-jerk reaction would be to blame Rodgers for this. The veteran was given the keys to the clubhouse and allowed to play Augustus as potential free agent and trade additions duked it out, waiting for his thumbs up or down. Former Green Bay Packers like Randall Cobb, Allen Lazard and Davante Adams joined the lineup to varying effect.
Cobb is currently a college football analyst. Lazard was overpaid ($11 million annually). Adams’s 6.0 yards per target are his lowest since 2015. Nathaniel Hackett, the offensive coordinator hand picked thanks in part to his past success with Rodgers, was stripped of his play calling duties.
But Douglas paved a road of disappointment well before Rodgers arrived. Sam Darnold went 7-6 in his first season with Douglas at GM and Gase as his head coach. Rather than prop him up with receiving help like the Buffalo Bills would do to unlock the best version of Josh Allen, the Jets opted to rebuild his offensive line in free agency.
They doled out contracts to George Fant, Connor McGovern and Greg Van Roten. Darnold’s blitz rate dropped, but his pressure and sack rates both rose. There was no reliable wideout to bail him out of tough situations because New York’s answer for Robbie Chosen’s departure was to sign Breshad Perriman.
Darnold went 2-10 that season and was summarily traded to the Carolina Panthers. Gase was fired. Douglas was paired with Robert Saleh, a rising young defensive-minded head coach and given the directive to find a franchise quarterback who could thrive along the rising tide of an improving defense. He landed on Zach Wilson, the second overall pick in a crop of cursed quarterbacks.
Wilson failed — an understandable miss, given the abject lack of success from guys selected after him like Trey Lance, Justin Fields and Mac Jones — and the directive changed. Douglas needed to save his job with a big swing. He landed on an unhappy quarterback nearing his 40th birthday and coming off his least efficient season as a starter. 2022 was a season in which the Packers missed the playoffs with a healthy Rodgers for only the second time in 13 years.
Rodgers can’t be faulted for playing like a 40-year-old just because Tom Brady broke our collective brains. His decline was obvious, even before landing on the fact the Jets offered him many of the same issues that chased him out of Green Bay, from offensive line concerns to wideout depth.
What was surprising was Saleh’s sacrifice after Week 5, a desperate bid to shake things up that instead destabilized New York’s defense. The Jets ranked sixth in expected points added (EPA) allowed per play under Saleh. Since firing him, they’re 30th, nestled between the Panthers and Dallas Cowboys in the rankings.
Having exhausted the “blame Saleh” stack (which looks even worse in hindsight) and unwilling to alienate the quarterback upon which they once staked their future, the Jets had little recourse but to fire the architect of it all. Douglas could have survived these events in a vacuum, but at some point bad luck gives way to incompetence. It’s easy to fire a general manager who was given more than five years to turn things around and couldn’t even win a third of his games.
This does not fix the organizational rot that existed before Douglas and threatens to linger long into the future. All evidence suggests building around Rodgers was a mistake. Douglas’s replacement will have to walk on eggshells around the veteran quarterback, all the while knowing he could shave money from a below-average salary cap situation by releasing the former four-time MVP. He’ll likely be tasked with using New York’s pending top-10 draft pick to either find his next franchise quarterback (in a draft filled with flawed prospects) or a playmaker who may not find his rhythm in the NFL until Rodgers is gone.
The Jets should not be as bad as they are. There are several genuinely good young players around which they should build. Instead, the franchise’s insistence on throwing good money after bad has left a team with Super Bowl hopes staring at a 3-8 record. Maybe things get better without Douglas around. But odds are, he’s just another scapegoat for a team unable or unwilling to create the long-term fix it desperately needs.
