Hess was the owner so the buck stopped with him. BTW Hess despised bad behavior & always demand that we hire smart players instead of players who can play FB. Can U imagine a guy with that attitude owning a FB team where fans beat up on each other. Maybe that is why he did not attend many games
Michaels was an ok coach. He really wasn't a great communicator. Walton was absolutely awful. Besides the constant nose picking on the sidelines, which really was ridiculous, he went from an EXCELLENT offensive coordinator to a ridiculously conservative head coach. The Jets during his ERA, and even the Michaels ERA alot of the time, were a team always getting penalized and a team that often looked poorly coached. The odd thing was that Michaels was a big time defensive coordinator (1968 Jets Super Bowl def coordinator) and Walton was a big time offensive coordinator.
This is a no brainer - Favorable! This guy set records for getting sacked, and yet his numbers are outstanding: 58.6 completion percentage and 128 touchdowns versus 98 interceptions! That's incredible, compared to Richard Todd and the team he played with. Add that to the pressure of playing in New York as a relative unknown who was chosen ahead of Dan Marino, and you have to give the guy his props! Think of how bad the Jets would have been without O'Brien? Imagine Marino in his place - the guy would have been killed. O'Brien stayed in the pocket, stayed tough - and did his damndest to win. He got hit, got back up and went back to work time after time. FAVORABLE!
Let's get something straight, Walt Michaels had a substance abuse problem, and his personality was abusive to begin with. Michaels was often drunk and disorderly, and the team kept it under wraps as long as they could. He also had an issue (from what I've heard) with perscription pain pills. Michaels was also a devisive force in the Jets' locker room. Word is that he was somewhat racist, and if you recall from those days the Jets' locker room was totally divided. Sure, the Klecko's and Fields' and Buttle's loved him - also far right wing guys - but there was a strong group in the locker room that hated him. I have a friend that knows Matt Robinson very well, and he told me that Matt can tell stories about how the team was divided along racial lines, and that Michaels fed into that. The guy had all the makings of a great head coach, but two issues - his substance abuse problems, and his racial diversification of the team led to his downfall. The reason he never got another HC job was the substance abuse issue.
