By now you have likely heard about the comments New York Jets owner Woody Johnson made about his 0-7 team earlier in the week.
There are a number of different angles we could from this.
I couldn’t help but think about a complaint I hear constantly from Jets fans about the team. That is a lack of accountability within the franchise. Fans have complained about this for years.
Comments like Woody Johnson’s go a long way towards explaining why there is seldom accountability with the New York Jets. The man who has been in charge as the Jets have put together the longest postseason drought in professional sports immediately pointed the finger at somebody else when discussing the reasons for the team’s struggles.
Why would anybody ever expect accountability from an organization whose leader never takes responsibility for his own failings?
We could also discuss how unnecessary and harmful these comments were.
Justin Fields is a 26 year old player going through the toughest sort of stretch a young athlete can experience. He is playing poorly. He is a lightning rod for criticism within the fanbase and the media. His confidence level is likely low. Now as he’s trying to fight his way out of a potentially career-altering slump, he needs to answer questions like this.
Aaron Glenn is a first year coach trying to execute a massive turnaround. Little has gone right so far. The last thing he needs as he tries to boost the team from a disastrous start is to deal with an owner generated controversy.
I’m not convinced that there are many “good” owners in the NFL. Most of them seem to not know what they are doing. I think as a fan you really hope that they just do as little harm as possible.
Even considering how little most owners add to their teams, I would be pretty confident in the vast majority to avoid creating a needless controversy like this in the middle of a dire period for their team. The few I wouldn’t are guys like Jerry Jones and yes, Woody Johnson, who are known for being particularly damaging for their respective teams.
There are a number of other takeaways we can and should have. I offered some the other day.
One thought I could not shake was that these comments actually offer a lot of insight into the way Woody Johnson views the NFL and why the Jets have struggled so much under his watch.
It is not easy to build a good NFL team.
A team needs 22 starters. Beyond that, there are a number of role players and backups who are significant parts of a team. A roster has 53 players. A practice squad has 17.
With all of these players, complex schemes need to be developed on both sides of the ball. Along with the number of players and positions that need instruction, this requires a large coaching staff to be assembled.
The number of players on a roster also requires a large front office and scouting staff. How else could a team find these players?
There are needs beyond that. A team needs a large support staff.
Of course some people are more important than others. A quarterback is more important than a practice squad guard. The head coach is more important than a low level area scout. A number one cornerback is more important than the assistant running backs coach.
Still, in an organization so large and complex, one person isn’t enough to make or break things. Even the best organization in the league isn’t going to have great people across the board, but there need to be a lot of good people in the key spots working together effectively.
That isn’t the approach the New York Jets take under Woody Johnson.
Woody Johnson emphasizes the importance of a small number of people. In Jets World, the team always seems to believe it is one move away from greatness, either dumping one person who isn’t panning out or adding the key member of the team who will change everything.
There was no greater example of this quick fix thinking than the 2024 season when it seemed like the owner was selling a new silver bullet each week that would cure all of the team’s problems.
It began with the firing of Robert Saleh after a Week 5 loss to the Minnesota Vikings.
Johnson said the following:
This morning, I informed Robert Saleh that he will no longer serve as the Head Coach of the Jets. I thanked him for his hard work these past three-and-a-half years and wished him and his family well moving forward. This was not an easy decision, but we are not where we should be given our expectations, and I believe now is the best time for us to move in a different direction.
Jeff Ulbrich will serve as our Interim Head Coach for the remainder of the season. He is a tough coach who has the respect of the coaches and players on this team. I believe he along with the coaches on this staff can get the most of our talented team and attain the goals we established this offseason.
The Jets proceeded to lose their next game to fall to 2-4. The team prompted traded for Davante Adams.
Johnson spoke of the impact he was expecting the trade for Adams to make.
Adams played very well during his short stint with the Jets. Despite his contributions, the Jets went 3-8 in games he played. Such was the impact of one big move.
Days later, Johnson reportedly played an active role in ending the holdout of disgruntled defensive end Haason Reddick. Reddick had been sitting at home in a contract dispute with the Jets since being acquired in a trade. While holding out, Reddick was not collecting a paycheck. This latest solution to the Jets’ problems amounted to Reddick beginning a paid vacation as he mailed in his performance, registering only a single sack in green and white.
It was one season-saving move a week a year ago this time for the Jets. Only none of them worked. Even three major moves sometimes aren’t enough to move something as big as an NFL team if too many parts are defective.
This wouldn’t be much of a story if we couldn’t hit the rewind button a bit.
The previous December, Johnson decided to retain Saleh along with general manager Joe Douglas. Here was his stated rationale at the time.
“Just to keep the continuity going with Aaron and the team we’ve got,” Johnson said as a reason why he wants Douglas and Saleh back. “Like I said a year ago, we need a quarterback. We had a quarterback for four plays. Since then we haven’t been able to replace him. If we have a good quarterback, it makes everybody’s job easier. It makes the line better, the receivers better.”
As you are probably aware, “Aaron” is Aaron Rodgers, who suffered a season-ending injury four plays into the 2023 season. Johnson stated on the roster he felt that that all (or at least the bulk) of the Jets’ 2023 woes were due to not having their quarterback. That was his reasoning for bringing back Saleh.
And so it went for the Jets through the 2024 offseason. Saleh wasn’t the only coach to keep his job. The team did not fire inept offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett under the premise that Rodgers’ return would fix all that was wrong with the offense.
It took five games of Rodgers not fixing everything for Saleh to be fired.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t know many coaches who go from being good to fire-worthy in five games.
But that’s the way Woody Johnson views things, and that’s the way the Jets operate. They think one person makes or breaks everything.
In case anybody is doubting that, Johnson doubled down on that view weeks after his announcement that Saleh was returning where he made it clear he saw Zach Wilson as the sole factor that sunk the 2023 Jets.
Never mind that the team entered the season with one starting tackle who was 38 years old and another who had just missed two full seasons to injury. Never mind a extreme lack of quality behind Garrett Wilson at wide receiver that year. Never mind the aforementioned inept Hackett managing the offense. Never mind any number of other issues that could be mentioned.
Reader, I’m not suggesting that Zach Wilson played well in 2023, but an NFL team is a large and complex organism with a lot of moving parts. The quarterback is the most important player on the field, but he isn’t the only thing that makes a team succeed or fail.
Try telling that to the Jets.
Try telling that to Woody Johnson.
We can move even further backwards.
One year earlier the Jets, of course, traded for Rodgers. According to one report, the Jets actually believed that Rodgers in a season he was turning 40 would be worth five wins. Thus they did everything in their power to land him. They hired perhaps the league’s worst offensive coordinator because that coordinator was a Rodgers favorite. They signed wide receivers with limited skills because Rodgers liked them. The entire organization was essentially restructured around Rodgers.
It didn’t work. Of course Rodgers’ injury played a role in that. Was it the sole thing that prevented success, though? I have laid out only a fraction of the organizational issues that plagued the Jets in this era. And when Rodgers returned in 2024, the team’s win total went down. The supporting cast wasn’t good enough, and an aging Rodgers showed serious signs of decline.
The 2025 season has been a miserable one for the Jets and their fans. There are subplots that go beyond the play of the team. Many fans have noted the success prominent former Jets are having on other teams. Chief among them are Rodgers himself and Sam Darnold, two quarterbacks the Jets have shown the door over the past five seasons.
There seem to be two responses to the success these players are having.
The Jets made a ghastly error letting them leave, and things would be so much better if they were still here.
The Jets are cursed. There is some supernatural force that makes players fail with the Jets and allows them to succeed with other teams.
I don’t think either of these is really accurate in general, though, and definitely not in the cases of Rodgers and Darnold.
Even if we get past all of the other factors, keeping Rodgers in 2025 was never practical for the Jets if only for finances. The Jets would have been looking at a dead money hit of over $60 million on their 2026 salary cap if Rodgers remained with the team.
We will get to Darnold, but at the time he was traded to Carolina keeping him was not a viable option either.
So what do we make of the success these players are having?
I think in the case of Rodgers a couple of things are true.
First is that he’s playing well. Second is that he’s not close to the form he showed in Green Bay when he won four MVPs.
Rodgers is currently 9th in the league in passer rating, 15th in success rate, and 18th in QBR. He is still a viable starting quarterback in this league, but it seems fair to say he is no longer an impact player. In the context of a better situation this year in Pittsburgh, you might even make the case his level of play isn’t that much higher than what he showed last year in New York.
There’s one other key sets of numbers I would also like to point out. Rodgers is actually throwing for less yards per game in Pittsburgh this year than he did with the Jets a year ago. In fact, Rodgers’ 211 passing yards per game is on pace to be the lowest of his career.
Why is that number so low? Well, Rodgers is also on pace to average less than 30 passing attempts per game for the first time in his career.
This brings me to THE key point. If you learn this point, you will start to understand why the Jets always fail with the Woody Johnson method and why the Pittsburgh Steelers by comparison are one of the league’s great franchises.
The Woody Johnson method had the Jets build their entire franchise around an aging Aaron Rodgers and expected him to fix all of their problems.
The Pittsburgh Steelers brought in Aaron Rodgers to a stable and well-built structure and asked him to be a piece of the puzzle. They are paying him $14 million in salary. That’s three-eighths of what he was making with the Jets. In Pittsburgh, he has only needed to play the role of a high end game manager. Get the ball where it needs to go. Avoid the big mistake. And he still has the occasional “In case of emergency break glass” big time throw left in him.
He just can’t do it all game long like he used to…or like the Jets expected him to.
If Rodgers was still in New York, I would wager that the Jets would have more wins than they do now, but I guarantee they would not be a good team. They would be asking too much just as they did a year ago.
Speaking of asking too much, we can talk about Darnold’s star-crossed tenure with the Jets. Drafted as a 21 year old rookie, Darnold was immediately thrown into the starting lineup on some truly dreadful Jets teams. As he first started out, Darnold was still trying to figure out the basics of running an offense and reading a defense.
How did the Jets support him? After year one, they gave him Adam Gase as his head coach. They gave him an offense where the wide receiver formerly known as Robby Anderson was his top target, and then let even him leave in free agency. By the end of his tenure, Darnold was a broken quarterback handing the ball off to the venerable but washed up Frank Gore and throwing the ball to the likes of Breshad Perriman.
Could it have worked in New York? Sure, had the Jets actually invested in building a team to help lift Darnold up in his early days he probably would have made it with the team. But this team showed zero ability or interest in putting the right pieces around Darnold. The general manager who drafted him, Mike Maccagnan never drafted an offensive lineman higher than the third round in five years on the job. Darnold was essentially tasked with lifting an offense on his back as he was still learning the basics.
He bounced around the league for a couple of years. A failed stop in Carolina was followed by a year in San Francisco learning under offensive guru Kyle Shanahan. His breakout season came under another excellent offensive coach, Kevin O’Connell in Minnesota. Now he is having success in Seattle.
Darnold might not be be able to benefit from Shanahan or O’Connell calling plays for him anymore, but you can bet he will keep the lessons he taught them in quarterbacking for the rest of his career and is a better player for them. These are lessons he never got in New York.
Again, the Jets thought one player could lift the franchise up with no help. All you have to do is read some of the things that was said and reported in that era.
One story stands out to me from halfway through Darnold’s second season.
Sam Darnold burst into Adam Gase’s office three weeks ago, cheeks beet red. He had something he needed to say, but he wasn’t sure how to express it or how it would be received.
The Jets were losing, and Darnold was struggling. This offense, supposedly coached in the direction football was going, was stuck in reverse. Darnold had enough and had kept quiet far too long. So he sat his coach down. He requested they go over the playbook.
Darnold told Gase precisely what he liked, then what he didn’t. He went over the plays and concepts he felt his teammates ran effectively and those they needed to throw out. He was open. He was honest. And when he was done, he looked like a kid who stood up to his Dad for the first time.
Gase, seated across the desk, smiled at his 22-year-old quarterback.
“It’s about damn time,” he said.
You read that correctly. It took halfway through the season for Gase to tailor the offense to concepts Darnold was comfortable with, and it only came because Darnold proactively asked for it.
Even more incredibly, Gase’s response was to chide Darnold for not doing it sooner. You’d think it wasn’t Gase’s job to do this from the start of training camp.
That’s the way the Jets operated then. One person was responsible for everything.
It didn’t work.
It’s still the way the Jets operate. One person is responsible for everything, or so Woody Johnson thinks.
It still doesn’t work.
Johnson thinks one player can save or sink a franchise. The truth is more complex, though. This is a Jets team with numerous issues, many stemming from the need to dig out from many of the aforementioned mistakes the owner made.
This is not a defense of Justin Fields. His play has been terrible. He is now in his fifth year with his fourth coaching staff on his third team. Fields has yet to establish himself as a quality starting NFL quarterback.
Fields wasn’t good enough in his previous stops. Still, he was playing at a higher level in Chicago and Pittsburgh. With the Jets, his numbers have regressed to where he was as a rookie.
Fields QBR by year
2021: 31.4
2022: 56.3
2023: 46.9
2024: 47.4
2025: 31.8
The reasons for this decline are numerous and complex. To be sure, Fields has to own an appreciable amount of blame for his regression.
Still, it doesn’t seem like a stretch to say that the reasons for it probably run deeper to some degree. Fields isn’t the first player to show the worst version of himself with the Jets.
A lot of that stems from the way the Jets build their team, which itself stems from the flawed way the owner views the NFL. It takes a team to win.
Individuals only have so much impact. But the individual capable of doing the most damage isn’t a bad quarterback. It’s a bad owner.