Would Sam Howell make sense?

Edition #582

Good morning! ☕

For some reason, the Jets backup QB is the flavour of the moment. We’re still weeks away from free agency, we need plenty of additions to challenge, but over the last 24-48 hours there have been multiple reports on who the Jets are targeting. Jacoby Brissett is a name I continue to hear a lot, but nobody has picked up more steam than Sam Howell. Would that make sense?

• Jets cornerback DJ Reed has made it clear who he wants the Jets to sign to be the backup in 2024. Personally, I think you can do both and carry three QBs. You have your starting QB in Rodgers, your immediate backup in Brissett and then the low-cost developmental QB in Howell. It doesn’t have to be one or the other, not for me.

• With Rob Calabrese having left the Jets to take up a position with the LA Rams, Ron Middleton is now the only member of Saleh’s original offensive coach staff left with the Jets. It’s safe to say that the coaching personnel decisions were pretty awful, he went with youth instead of experience and we’ve had 3 years of poor offensive output.

• According to multiple reports from ESPN and other media outlets, the Jets are not expected to tag Bryce Huff, as expected. Franchise tags don’t usually get used until late February/early March. You rarely see a team tag a player within the first week of the window opening, that’s important negotiation time for long-term extensions. We’ll start seeing tags placed on players after the combine.

• It wouldn’t be a quick-throw section without a mock. Another one from NFL.com, this time from Gennaro Filice. He has Joe Alt falling to number 10 and that to me is a dream scenario…but it’s not going to happen. “The Aaron Rodgers replacements caught plenty of deserved flak for shoddy quarterback play last season, but to be fair, they weren’t given much of a chance by the porous offensive line. With Rodgers back under center, GM Joe Douglas is thrilled to get his pick of a talented tackle litter here. The towering Alt feels like one of the cleanest prospect evals in this class.”

• Daniel Jeremiah also had his 2.0 mock draft out, and he had the Jets taking Taliese Fuaga, the same player he had us taking in his 1.0 mock: “I tried to connect different players to the Jets, but I keep coming back to the same one. Fuaga is a plug-and-play right tackle.”

There was an interesting piece that came from ‘The Dynasty: New England Patriots’ Episode 4: Spygate’ where Robert Kraft (Patriots owner) spoke about New England being caught filming Jets coaches: “I couldn’t believe it, I went right over to Bill and I said, Let me ask you something Bill, how important to us is something like that on a scale of one to 100. And he said to me, ‘one’. I said to him, Then you’re a real schmuck.”

🟢⚪ I’ve seen a number of reports linking the Jets with a move for Washington QB Sam Howell, and I went searching for the origin. It seems as though the link came from an SNY Q&A with Connor Hughes. Hughes never said the Jets were interested or he’d heard this was a path they were ready to tread, merely that he likes the idea and “There are those in the Jets building who believe he can play, too”.

So this is an extremely weak link, more a hypothetical scenario. But it’s February and we don’t have much else to talk about, so let’s have a look at that hypothetical.