Woody Johnson: Please Sell the Team

Edition #732

Good morning ☕

One of the worst things in professional sports is apathy. When a fanbase reaches that stage it’s a long way back.

This week I’ve received several emails (nice ones) from people who are unsubscribing, not because they haven’t enjoyed TJW, but because they can no longer invest any of their time, money or energy to the New York Jets.

In short, they’re apathetic. They just don’t care anymore. And do you know what? I get it. I understand that stance.

Woody Johnson has owned this team for 25 years, and over the course of those 25 years the Jets have gone 170-225. That’s 55 games under .500.

They’ve made the playoffs just 6 times in 25 years which is a hit rate of less than 25%.

2015 was the last time the Jets had a winning season and they’ve only had 5 double-digit wins in a season over the last 25 years.

Woody is the owner of one of the worst franchises in world sport, and the owner of the team with the longest playoff drought in North American sports.

That can’t be enjoyable for him. He’s universally derived by fans and media for his lack of football sense, his knee-jerk reactions and his tendency to listen to the wrong people at the wrong time.

Even when he shows patience like he has done with Joe Douglas and did to an extent with Robert Saleh, he screws it up by interfering with Douglas and firing Saleh 5 games into a season.

I don’t like to quote Bill Belichick too often here at TJW but he said it best:

”Woody is Woody”

Despite all that ineptitude on the field, Woody keeps sticking it to Jets fans.

Season ticket prices just keep going up. I haven’t seen all the prices but I’ve spoken to a fair few fans who had their tickets increase by 23% this year, which is on top of the 25% that increased last year and the 10+% they increased the year before.

Woody will justify this by having a “star” QB. But that star QB is in serious decline and is failing to win football games. So that “star” may not be shining as brightly as Woody would want you to believe.

I can’t sit here and tell you to give up your season tickets and hit him in his wallet. Fans go to games for several different reasons, for some it’s an escape, for some it’s a bond with family and for some it’s the memory of times shared with people who are no longer here. So to just sit back and say, well stop going is too simplistic.

The truth of the matter is that we can’t force Woody to sell.

If he doesn’t want to sell, he just won’t. We can decide not to spend as much money on the team, we can decide to fly some planes over the stadium which would showcase our disappointment. In the UK we’d tend to have demonstrations outside the ground and some unsavoury chanting inside the ground to showcase the disapproval, but I’ve never seen a lot of that in the states.

The NFL is booming. Franchises just continue to get more and more valuable, so as far as an investment goes, it’s not a bad one.

Image inserted just for Bobber.

The only person who can make Woody sell the team is Woody, and he’s shown no signs of doing that. I think he likes the attention and the gravitas of being an NFL owner if I’m perfectly honest. It’s not just the money, it’s the power.

Former NFL Network man Mike Silver recently said "I admire his intentions, but I just think he's really bad at running an NFL team, Actually, I don't think so, I know, and that's been proven over time. … I used to rank owners every year... I was pretty brutal, and this is not just me saying that, this is people who have worked with him, this is other owners."

So the fans think he’s bad, his former employees think he’s bad and fellow owners think he’s bad. Is it any wonder we haven’t won anything in over 50 years?

So if he’s not going to sell the team, where do we go from here?

He needs to be more like the Rooney family over in Pittsburgh. Hire football people and then stay the hell out of the way. I thought he was doing that with Douglas and Saleh, but then came the opportunity to get Aaron and it unravelled from there.

Some owners are cheap, and I will say that’s one thing you can’t accuse Woody of being. He’s always willing to open the cheque book, but he often opens it for the wrong people at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons.

If reports are to be believed Woody Johnson was the driving force in the trade for Tim Tebow, Brett Favre and Aaron Rodgers. How have they worked out? He’s then tried to recuperate his losses by bending over backwards for Rodgers, which has just completely blown up in his face.

But remember this is the man who said “Thinking is overrated” recently. So we can’t really be surprised can we.

I’m just not sure what Woody gets out of owning this team.

• The Houston Texans have one of the nest pass-rushes in the NFL this season. They rank No. 3 in sacks and No. 8 in pressure rate over the first 8 games.

• They did however lose Stefon Diggs to an ACL injury. They’ll still beat us on Thursday.

• The Jets run defense is going to have to be at its best on Thursday with Joe Mixon averaging 4.9 yards per carry and is third in the NFL with 123.6 scrimmage yards per game.

• The Texans pass-protection is a little bit of an issue this season and if Reddick was going to have himself a game, it should be this one. C. J. Stroud has been sacked the third-most times in the league (22).

• Throughout this season the Jets have struggled to handle the blitz, which doesn’t bode that well for Thursday. Houston blitzes 28.2% of the time, the eighth highest in the NFL.

• NFL power rankings are too depressing to do as a segment, but here is how NFL.com have the Jets - 24th - “A season that began with optimism has once again devolved to misery. There actually have been 2-6 teams that have gone on to make the playoffs (and even win their respective divisions), but hope seems to be all but lost for the Jets. The talent is there; the execution is not. Haason Reddick was the latest big-name player to join the mix (he logged two pressures in 26 defensive snaps), only to watch the team crumble in the second half of what became the New York's fifth straight loss. Aaron Rodgers played well enough while also looking like a guy who really wanted to avoid contact. The Jets used three timeouts in the first quarter to prevent play-clock violations. They twice punted in New England territory and allowed the Patriots' backup quarterback to drive 61 and 70 yards and take leads on them in the fourth quarter. They missed an extra-point and a field-goal try in a three-point loss. The entire operation is just a mess, and there are no big moves left to make to try to fix it.”

• PFF ran a new mock draft and had the Jets drafting Mason Graham #4 overall. “According to on-paper talent, the Jets shouldn’t be here in the top five. After trading for Davante Adams and getting edge defender Haason Reddick to end his holdout, their team needs have changed a bit. However, adding a consistent interior defensive line presence remains. Graham is dominant, and combining him with Quinnen Williams is a terrifying thought for an interior offensive line.”

• Garrett Wilson has gained separation on 69% of his routes this season which is a top-10 number in the league. Tyler Conklin is only slightly lower at 65%.

• Sauce Gardner can’t tackle and while he gave up a big play on Sunday, he’s still one of the best cornerbacks in the NFL at preventing separation. According to PFF he lockdowns 80% of his routes, 7th best in football.

• Will McDonald Jr is starting to draw attention from defensive coordinators, he’s being chipped on 13% of his pass-rush snaps, that’s around the same as Aidan Hutchinson and Trey Hendrickson and higher than Danielle Hunter in Houston.

• Show me a graph which perfectly highlights the fact that the Jets stuck with Greg Zuerlein too much…

• Jeff Ulbrich said that Sauce Gardner's tackling needs to be better and Sauce knows that, but there was an improvement against New England.

• Also confirmed the team has not considered sitting Aaron Rodgers to allow him to get healthy.

• The kicking competition will go on tomorrow and the best kicker will kick on Thursday night 👇

There is a lot of talk online at the moment about Rex Ryan taking charge. This is a daily reminder that that would be a horrible idea, truly horrendous and stupid idea. So obviously it’s very plausible that the Jets do it. The thought of hiring a coach who has a career record under .500 who hasn’t coached a team with a winning record since 2010 and hasn’t coached a team at all in 8 years is mind-numbing to me.