So Cincinnati is a good team who didn't bring back Lawson? Right. And "look at the bones" ? The front office has gutted the roster and is building through the draft and young FAs. We have probably the youngest roster in the league.
The Jets being unable to draft well is the cause, the effect is overpaying in free agency to fill holes. Fix the drafting the free agency will fall in line.
I have to ask this... How many of JD's FA signings have panned out? They all seem to be of the one and done variety but perhaps I'm missing a few here or there. Help me out TGG!
Well, good point. But it supports the idea that he wants to run things through the draft. Short term deals that he can get out from under while *hopefully* the draft classes slowly start to fill out the roster better than being third, fourth and fifth round consistent inactives. He still needs to sign free agents to meet the required spending limits and form a formidable team though. His free agent spending and contracts haven't been an issue. One might argue that he hasn't been an excellent drafter or free agent guy quite yet although the draft classes still have some time to pull more contributors out of them.
Well up until this year, most of his signings were low price gap filler types. Perriman was a bad signing, Fant was a decent signing, probably the best of the OL or maybe the Center. But they’ve been cheaper gap guys on a shit roster that he knew he’d be tearing down and rebuilding. this year, he went for a different caliber signing to help augment his drafting…Lawson and Davis were similar signings in that they were young guys with upside. It’s a shame about Lawsons injury but the signing in and of itself I think was a good one. Davis seems to be playing well. I have mixed feelings about last years draft class but feel much better about this years class as a whole. we’ll see…
its a chicken before the egg/egg before the chicken thing. Neither is really right or wrong. If the Jets had drafted say.. Alvin Kamara... he woulda made Sam Darnold or Josh McCown look pretty darned good
I do not think Kamara would have made Darnold look good because Darnold is a shitty QB who makes poor decisions. But your point is not what is being argued. Drafting Kamara would been great. You are pointing out my argument. Our issues have not been Free Agency signings but how we have managed previous drafts. Our inability to draft has been the cause of our demise, not the signing of big name free agents.
The Jets inability to draft well is the entire problem. Your inability to see that is also a problem. You are blaming free agency signings as the central cause of the Jets issues in years past. That is blatantly false. The central cause of our issues is our inability to draft talent and find talent in later rounds. A large part of that falling at the feet of the QB position.
Not all of our draft picks have been bad. Its our ability to keep them on them on the roster that has suffered because they end up somewhere else. Has anyone since Wilkerson been resigned after their rookie contract? JD has continued that trend guns blazing. But we also had a ton of rebuilding assets. Our problem since the 10-6 season is we haven't tried to build a good o-line while we throw new QBs, two of them top 5 picks, behind them. Until we make a serious commitment to the o-line our offense will continue to be skitzo.
Exactly! It's common sense. The draft is the main way that franchises and GMs try to build their teams. That always has been and always will be, especially now in the days of salary caps. The better teams only go out and sign FAs to fill starter holes because the players they drafted to fill those positions were busts, haven't developed yet, or have struggled with injuries. Even then they are generally short-term deals. Otherwise, they look for cheap depth in FA. It's pretty much only the bad teams that have the cap space due to so many of their draft picks busting, that go out and spend big money in FA to sign a bunch of starters in an effort to become competitive. In the past, we have signed a lot of big ticket FAs to try to give the fanbase hope when our GMs couldn't draft worth a damn. We then had to be big players in FA, had to overpay, and that was usually older, expensive players. Now we have a GM in JD who knows how to evaluate talent and is drafting well. He is only looking to sign younger and/or cheaper players either as stop gaps until he can draft their replacements, or young players with a lot of potential in hopes that we can become competitive sooner. That's what the Lawson and Davis signings were. They provided two big talent boosts in areas we needed them most and are young players on the rise. When a team has as many holes as we had, there's no way they can all be filled in a timely manner via the draft. By the time one filled all the holes, the initial players one drafted would be retiring or needing to be replaced. Plus, one wants a mixture of veterans and youth. One shouldn't have a roster of all young players with no veteran leadership.
It's not that simple. The Jets routinely traded up in the 00's, picking good players in the process but creating holes down the road that had to be filled in free agency. This worked (sort of, off and on) while the Parcells talent base was slowly aging out and it worked for a couple of seasons during the Rex era but then it flatlined and we've been doing stuff like this off and on for the last decade and declining steadily in the process. Fixing the drafting does nothing if we don't fix the process. Signing free agents does nothing unless the talent base to win is already there and they're putting us over the top. It's like a vicious circle that we're caught in and nothing seems to break it. Not signing free agents would break it because then all the trading up goes away as the Jets try to assemble a deep roster talented enough to compete. What we're watching now is an utter shitshow that is once again being veiled by a young QB who is theoretically promising but in fact likely to get taken down by the lack of talent around him. The Jets have had 4 drafted Qb's in the last two decades who ultimately failed because of key holes around them on the roster. Chad failed because the Jets let the OL get holey in front of him. Sanchez failed again because the OL had a hole and he got the crap beat out of him as a result. Geno? Well Geno got beat up a lot by the other team before one of his own LB's finished the job. Darnold never had a good line and barely had passable WR's. We think that JD has set up a good OL for Wilson but the left side is hurt right now and anybody else on that line could become a hole at any time if they start to age. The Jets did more for Chad after the Parcells line aged out than JD has done for Wilson and we still wound up with a turnstile LG in 2007 that got him knocked out. The turnstile for Sanchez was at RT and again he got beaten down. When I look at the optimists on TGG this year they look to me just like the drum beaters sitting alone in the centerfield bleachers in Major League. It doesn't matter how much you believe when we have the kind of crap we're looking at on the field and in the organization right now.
Who have we let go that’s we’re really missing. Adam’s? Robbie? We’ve had more draft picks completely flop out of the league in 3 years than players worth resigning, by a lot. The Sam draft class is almost gone now and will be by next February. The problem is missing on entire drafts. Everything else is a byproduct of that.
If we can trade Seattle’s 1st and Carolina’s 2nd (maybe include in Maye) for Demarcus Lawrence We’d in essence have traded: Jamal Adams and Sam Darnold For Demarcus Lawrence and AVT I would be Ok with that
Spot on. It is also a problem IMO to broad brush all Jets GMs as being equally guilty of this problem, with the draft and free agency. I think JD has in two years done so much more with the draft, improving the team on both sides of the ball, bringing in a no shit CS, OL focus, and avoiding long term contracts to vets that impact the future health of this organization than any other GM ever. If anything he has been very, very frugal with free agency, and even more so with trading away draft capital….and rightfully so. It’s a miracle as to how much young raw talent we now have in light of the horrific baseline he inherited basically two years ago.
We’ll look…we’ve done this several times already across multiple threads, but if we line up our drafts for the last ten years, or since the Parcells days, or even worse back into the 1990s, it an utter shit show. TONS of truly horrendous picks, and they look so often worse when you break down the drafts and see who we passed on to take some of these losers. Bad drafting has been to me, the root cause of our long standing losing. but NOT the only cause. It’s not an “OR”…it’s an “AND” our free agent signings have been a mixed bag our coaching has been more bad then good….as evidenced by the fact that outside of Pete Carroll, none of our coaches have gone on to success anywhere else. Nor have our former GMs. it’s the entire organization top to bottom. I think JD has been the best GM since Parcells…but he’s not been perfect either. But I feel like he has a vision and a plan and a strategy on how to build a team around the draft … Idzik had the same strategy but totally fucked the execution with horrendous drafting. Mac hit on some early picks like Q and Adams but he had no overall vision on how to actually build a roster…it’s like his picks were made in a vacuum…ok Adams is a good safety, it he didn’t stop to think you know, we need a QB more than a safety. Shit like that. overall, I’m more hopeful with this second JD draft than with the first one last year, but we’ll see…still very early to make final judgment.
We've seen time and again that good QB's elevate those around them but you still think the surrounding talent was to blame for all of our QB's failing? I just totally disagree. We picked bad QB's. That was 90% of our struggles. I think it's basically this simple: Picking a good QB is hard. Good QB's are rare. You need a good QB to have sustained success. The good QB is the prerequisite for success. We haven't had a good QB in over a decade. As others have stated - botching free agent signings is largely a symptom of drafting poorly. GM drafts poorly->GM signs expensive free agents to try to save his job->GM is fired leaving a mess for the next GM. Rinse and repeat. That cycle can only be broken if you give your GM a longer deal to clean up the mess AND that GM drafts well. Douglas has shown time and again that he is almost totally unwilling to even slightly overpay in FA. I'm not sure how you can argue he's making the same mistakes past GM's have.
Anyone who understands anything about football in the NFL and who knows anything about Jets' history know this is true. One can count the good QBs the Jets have drafted on three fingers: Namath, O'Brien and Pennington. Interceptaverde was pretty good for a year or two. Fitzpatrick had a career year in 2015. That's pretty much it. The rest were meh or worse. We've had only one great QB, Namath. It's amazing how some teams have has several. Packers: Starr, Favre, & Rodgers. Niners: Montana, Young & maybe Brodie. Colts: Unitas and Luck. Texans/Oilers: Moon and Watson. Chiefs: Dawson and Mahomes. Saints: Archie Manning and Brees. Some might say the Cowboys too with Staubach, Meredith and Prescott.
Tanny had few good drafts, and trades. Before Rex on the good drafts. Revis - HOF, Brick, Mangold, Harris, Leon W., B. Smith, etc. we had some really good teams after 2006-2007 drafts! Went downhill from there. Mangini might have had something to do with that. We had a few good trades under Tanny, trade up for revis, Keller, … Sanchez…. Edwards and Holmes. Parcels had some miserable drafts, but made up with signing his guys in FA Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
See I don't necessarily like this argument about the free agents. A franchise should never be evaluated, as a whole, based on free agency. Free agency is about taking massive gambles on guys that want massive amounts of money. If you spend less, you likely will not be signing someone who will make a huge impact. If you spend more you are signing someone who either wants a shit ton of money or someone who has an injury history and/or issues off the field. It is a huge gamble signing anyone in free agency and to point to that as a cause of a team's demise is not a fair assessment, in my opinion. Carl Lawson was an amazing signing. He was relatively inexpensive for his position but he came with an injury history. You can not blame JD for his injury and think that was a dumb signing. In my view, the entire franchise needs to be evaluated based on drafts. Every team in this league is built in the draft. You will NEVER have a winning franchise unless you draft right and find guys in all rounds. This franchise has proven to not only struggle with drafting talent, but they have also struggled in drafting the right talent at the right positions. That is our issue.
