Hi All, I was only 3 years into following football, so I was young, but in ‘98 it seemed to me that ole Ray Ray played well. Why didn’t they roll w/him the next year?
Ray Lucas was our QB in '99 because Bill Parcells in one of the few boneheaded moments of his career went into the '99 season with no real back up plan for Vinny Testaverde. He had Rick Mirer on the roster but Mirer was already a completely failed NFL QB. He acquired Mirer late in the summer, in a trade with the Packers, because he realized that if Testaverde went down he had nobody behind him to salvage the season. Parcell's basic strategy in the fall of '99 was to pray that Vinny stayed healthy and could produce another career season in a row. When Vinny went down in game one the Jets season was essentially over. Parcell's 3 year window to win a Super Bowl for Leon Hess before he passed from cancer was over. I have never seen a professional head coach look so defeated in the press conference after that game. Parcells knew the score and he knew what was to follow. Rick Mirer was the replacement and he was just what he had been in his previous stops: an occasional flash alongside a sputtering progression of misreads and bad throws. After watching this for half the season, at which point the Jets stood at 2-6, Parcells rallied behind the need to support his veteran team and he went to option 3, a special teams player who hadn't started at QB since Rutgers in 1995. Why did Parcells go to Lucas? Because the guy stood up and was accountable for everything he did on the football field. There was no expectation that Lucas would be a good QB but after watching Mirer screw up over and over again Parcells felt he had to go to the guy who had been running the scout team well and was accountable for everything that happened on his watch. Over the last 8 games of the season Parcells asked Ray Lucas to do what he was capable of and he was careful not to ask for much more. Lucas, for his part did everything he was asked to do and he did it well because the Jets and Parcells were careful to ask him to do things that he could do well. The Jets went 6-2 in the second half with Lucas under center and salvaged their season. His performance was very good but it left no illusions that he was a starting NFL QB. His proper role was excellent emergency QB when supported well by his teammates and coaching staff. He fulfilled that role to a "T" in 1999 and gave jets fans something to cheer about in an otherwise lost season in the process.
The next year Parcells left AL Grohl became the coach and the Jets drafted a QB by the name of Chad Pennington. VT was fully recovered and was the bridge QB to Pennington being a starter.
Ray parlayed his brief yet successful run into the main talking head on that ny jets show for yrs. I think he quit or was let go last yr over $$$. I liked him 100%. When he came in in'99 we had zero expectations, so his 6 wins were gravy!
I remember Lucas playing well and the team going 6-2 during the second half of the season… I always wondered what would’ve happened if Ray had come in after Vinnie got hurt and not Mirer
I think the Jets might have gone 9-7 instead of 8-8 and possibly made the playoffs but lost in the WC round. You have to remember that Mirer was trying to execute the offense the Jets drew up for Vinny. That offense was beyond Ray Lucas capability to execute. It relied on the QB driving the action off of a lot of play action and a lot of support from the run game. By the time Lucas got the job the Jets had revamped the offense to do things that he could do well. Still a lot of play action but much smaller things intended with the passes that resulted. A lot of bootleg action with keepers now and then to keep the defense honest. A lot of pure possession play with the idea being that you'd break a long one now and then. Vinny was a very special QB when he was on his game. He had one of the best arms in the game and he was not afraid to air it out even after he got picked. So I think the Jets did not lose a lot in waiting to go to Lucas. I think they probably got about as much as they could out of him and a big part of that was the adjustment they made to how the offense ran when he was in. BTW, none of this takes away from what Ray Lucas did. He was given a job in tough circumstances and he did it about as well as anybody could have given the situation.
The Jets would have played the Pats in Foxboro with a back-up QB named Brooks Bollinger. That’s because Pennington separated his shoulder sometime in the fourth quarter of the Pittsburgh game but the team wasn’t aware until tests were performed after the game. When exactly a Jets-Patriots AFC title game would have been played is another question we’ll never know. A nasty blizzard hit the northeast that Sunday but because the Patriots did not have home field advantage since the Steelers beat the Jets, the game was played in Pittsburgh. One would assume due to the importance of the game and the way Goodell runs things it may have been played the day before or perhaps even the day after. Back in the good ole days the game would have been played in a blinding blizzard and with the Jets playing a back-up QB. It would of had the makings of a crazy game....
When the hell has a football game ever been changed to the weather lol and Goodell wasn’t even the commissioner.
There was a lot of talk that week it would have been switched for fan safety. You are right about Goodell but I guarantee if that situation were real today the game would not be played in those conditions - at least not a championship game. Even when there’s a rumble of thunder games get stopped today... It happened to the Jets about 7 years ago when they were forced to play Buffalo in Detroit and I think it’s happened with a couple of other games including the Dolphins with incoming hurricanes.
Well said! But I remember it slightly differently. Didn’t we have Scott Zolak in camp that summer, and made the Mirer trade after Vinny went down? I was at that game of course, and got to see Tupa throw a TD pass. (Oh joy) Had Mirer been there via trade, wouldn’t he have come into the game? The dopey emergency QB rule was in effect. I never understood that anyway and still don’t.
We traded for Mirer on August 20th. Vinny went down just before the half in game one as I recall. I think Mirer was still being read into the offense at that point. He'd been with the team for a bit over two weeks. Parcells caught some rare heat in the press late in camp for having no viable backup QB option. The Mirer trade happened a few days later.
That summer, Chrebet appeared on a call in TV cable show hosted by Bruce Beck. I called in, got on, and my question to Wayne was about his confidence level in Zolak as the lone backup. He joked about me jinxing his QB (Vinny). So, as the Jets world now knows, it was my fault . But you remember it well because the “rare heat” Parcells was getting from the press must’ve been the impetus for my call. In fact, I think it was the first week of August. Thinking more about that, if Wayne was on the show it must have been when camp broke, though Mirer was not there yet.
Damn you I didn't even remember Zolak being on the roster by the way. I only remember him as a chowder head especially now that he does their radio color commentary, he's such a Pats homer its nauseating. Looked it up and Zolak was released shortly after Mirer was acquired, never made it to the reg season as a Jet
Was it over money or was it because he would be negative after losses? I suspect there was pressure from the Jets to get SNY to make a change. lately the post game show on SNY is just an apologist show
