Memorandum
To: Woody Johnson
From: John B
Date: January 9, 2026
RE: New York Jets Path Forward
Hello Woody.
You probably don’t remember me, but
two years ago I wrote to you with ten recommendations on how to move the Jets forward. You see, I am a big fan who was alarmed. I saw a potentially promising era of Jets football veering dangerously off course. There was time to save it and get things back on course, but it required forward thinking and tough decisions.
If you went through my recommendations, you will see that I did not get everything right. Nobody bats 1.000 after all. Still I think you’ll find I had a pretty good grasp of the dangerous path the team was on.
The Jets enter the 2024 offseason down a second round pick in the NFL Draft and limited in salary cap space. Filling all of the team’s holes will require another round of clearing cap space by pushing even more dead money into the future and further limiting the team’s flexibility going forward. If the Jets went to the AFC Championship Game this year, you might be able to argue for this approach to give the team the final push to the top. As currently constructed, the Jets are not close to being a Super Bowl team.
Further short term moves at the expense of the long run simply cannot be justified. This means no restructuring deals to clear cap space and no giving up Draft picks to bring in a receiver in his 30s like Davante Adams.
Regrettably I also had a sense of your management style.
You see, Woody, I know you too well. I know there’s no chance you will take my recommendations. You can never make an honest assessment about the Jets. You always talk yourself into believing the team is closer to glory than it really is. You always look for the quick fix.
(You’ll) “think” this thing through and start to buy into all the hype from August about this being a Super Bowl team. You’ll believe if not for the Rodgers injury, you’d be hoisting the Lombardi Trophy. You’ll ignore everything this season exposed about the Jets’ vulnerabilities. And the Jets will waste future resources chasing a championship beyond the team’s grasp.
That is how we got to where we are today. The situation is bleak, really bleak. The Jets just completed one of the worst seasons in franchise history. There is no leadership visible anywhere in the organization. The talent level has completely deteriorated. It is going to be an enormous task to climb out of the wreckage from which the New York Jets currently find themselves.
I think a lot of fans don’t appreciate just how bleak things are. You probably don’t. It’s easy to get enamored with the assets the team has, premium Draft picks and salary cap space, and talk yourself into believing everything will work itself out.
The problem is the starting point. The Jets have so many glaring needs that they actually might not possess enough assets to fix the team. It will surely take hitting on an inordinate number for this to turn around. And that assumes the team has the right leadership in place.
So, Woody, I’m returning with ten new recommendations. Some are different from the recommendations I made last time, but different problems require different solutions.
Recommendation #1: Acknowledge that you are the biggest reason the team has consistently failed over the last fifteen years.
Everybody knows the key numbers by now. The Jets have missed the Playoffs fifteen straight years. That isn’t just the longest postseason drought in the league. It’s the longest postseason drought by eight years.
In this span the Jets have had one winning season. Just twice has this team even been alive when it took the field for the final game of the regular season. The last of those was ten years ago. The Jets were only mathematically alive in Playoff contention one other time while playing the second to last game of the regular season.
This team hasn’t just been consistently bad. It hasn’t been competitive.
During this stretch, plenty has changed. The Jets have changed players. They have changed coaches. They have changed executives. They have even changed their uniforms twice.
The one constant is you, Woody. Well, you and your brother. During your three and a half year hiatus as the United States ambassador to the United Kingdom, you chose your brother to run the team, bypassing experience and knowledge in favor of a relative.
It’s practically a cliche to discuss the many, many instances where you have forced the team to make a foolish and costly decision.
You probably summed up the quality of your management of the team best a year ago when you uttered the phrase, “Thinking is overrated.”
There are likely hundreds of anecdotes that summarize your failed leadership, but for whatever reason two comments you made a few months apart come to the top of my mind when I look for the best way to articulate why you are so poor at your job.
This is
what you said a few weeks after your team signed Justin Fields to be its starting quarterback.
“I think Justin Fields is going to be a total winner for us,” Johnson said. “He’s going to be the starter, as you found out. I’ve been impressed with him since his college days. It was he or Trevor Lawrence. I think he’s going to be really good. He’s got to be put in the right situation and with Aaron [Glenn], they talk, I think, every day. I think it’s going to be very interesting to see how Justin progresses. He’s going to make a giant leap. He’s a dual threat, which we haven’t had in a while. I don’t know if we’ve ever had this kind of threat and we’ll put him in a good position to win.”
This raised eyebrows at the time for obvious reasons. You claim that when Fields entered the NFL Draft in 2021 that you had him rated with Trevor Lawrence as the two top quarterbacks. Yet when your team had the chance to pick Fields, the Jets instead opted for Zach Wilson.
Many laughed at the comment and questioned this discrepancy.
I, however, know you well Woody. I saw exactly what you were trying to do. It was your subtle way of showing the world how badly your football people let you down. Zach Wilson did fail with the team after all. If only Joe Douglas and Robert Saleh had listened to your sage scouting, the Jets would have had Fields and avoided the ugliness that followed.
I have to admit it was quite a performance. There was no way to definitively disprove that you wanted Fields over Wilson. Never mind that you were in charge of the team and have never shied away from imposing your will on major decisions.
But wait. Isn’t the complaint about Woody that he’s too heavy handed? He let his football people make a decision by overruling him on Fields. Now you’re criticizing him for deferring to the people he hired?
It was a true masterclass in after the fact scouting.
Of course things didn’t go so well for Fields once the games actually started. He struggled, and the Jets started 0-7. After that seventh loss, things weren’t so rosy between you and Fields.
Jets Owner Woody Johnson just obliterated Justin Fields while defending Aaron Glenn:
“If you look at any head coach with a quarterback like that, you’re going to see similar results.”
pic.twitter.com/QzGWAnTP4U
— SleeperNFL (@SleeperNFL)
October 21, 2025
Now of course Justin Fields’ play was very poor, but it’s still striking to hear these words coming from the owner. That’s doubly true when the owner a few months earlier implied that things would have been better if the people managing his team had taken his advice a few years back and drafted this same quarterback. The comments about your scouting report on Fields were nowhere to be found on that day.
There was also no mention of your fault in all of this, Woody. You are the only constant during this fifteen year stretch of failure. The Jets were a mess long before Justin Fields signed, and they became more of a mess after his benching.
Leadership means taking responsibility for your part in failure. In your case, Woody, the responsibility is large. We can cite chapter and verse the Jets missteps for which you are directly responsible.
The Jets have developed a culture where accountability is lacking. It isn’t the only reason this team loses consistently, but it is part of the story. With an owner who acts like this, it’s not hard to see how this culture developed. It started at the top, and trickled down the rest of the way.
Recommendation #2: Hire a professional CEO
This was my final recommendation two years ago. Everything I wrote then still applies.
I’m not going to waste time asking you to, “Sell the team,” or take some action that has no chance of happening.
But there is no rule in the NFL that the owner has to be in charge of the day to day operations of a franchise.
Woody, it’s time to fire yourself as CEO. You’ve proven you are terrible at running the Jets. There are hundreds if not thousands of executives in the sports and business worlds who would love to take over operating an NFL team.
Here’s how it works. You hire somebody as CEO. That person makes all of the decisions going forward. He or she has say over the coaching staff and front office. You relinquish decisions over everything else. You no longer make any decisions about the roster, coaches, or front office. You still have control, though. At the end of each season, you can decide whether the CEO is doing a good job. If you think so, they stay. If you think not, they get fired and you pick a new one.
Do I trust you to make an effective CEO hire? Not really, but with the exceptional pool of candidates who will be interested in this job, our odds of success will be much higher.
I will amend this a tad. I know it’s a long shot, but now I will ask you to sell the team. If you have read this far, you should know how terrible of an owner you are and how much pain you have brought to this fanbase. You bought the team for $635 million in 2000. Forbes
now estimates you could sell it for over $8 billion. Take your profit, and enjoy your life. It will save me the time of typing out eight more recommendations.
If I can’t convince you to sell, then hire a CEO. In fact, you know what? Just hire me. I’ll take the job. I’ve come up with a plan to get this team back on track.
Recommendation #3: Embrace your new role.
Woody, you are no longer running day to day operation of the team, but you remain the owner and still are a public face of the New York Jets.
Here’s the thing. Your behavior is a colossal embarrassment.
Episode after episode
has been documented.
In 2022, quarterback Mike White played through broken ribs in a late-season game against the Seahawks with postseason hopes on the line. White played poorly; the Jets lost and were eliminated from playoff contention. After the game, with the quarterback in the showers after throwing his helmet to the locker room floor, multiple Jets players said they heard Woody Johnson say, “You should throw your helmet, you f—ing suck.” The statement got back to White. The team spokesperson said Johnson apologized to the quarterback, who declined to comment for this story.
In the postgame locker room after last year’s Week 17 loss to the Cleveland Browns, multiple players said they heard Johnson’s sons loudly disparaging certain Jets players.
This year, on Halloween night, the Jets registered their first victory since Saleh’s firing four weeks earlier. It was a significant moment for a struggling team. Rodgers walked into an energized locker room with a game ball in hand, and it was expected that he’d give the ball to Ulbrich, a customary gesture when a coach gets his first NFL win.
But before Rodgers could speak, Brick Johnson took another game ball and awarded it to wide receiver Garrett Wilson in a profanity-laced exclamation, which the owner’s son later posted to Instagram. Woody Johnson then gave Ulbrich the ball Rodgers had been holding. Multiple players said the energy felt drained out of the room.
“It was the most awkward, cringe-worthy, brutal experience,” one player said.
We already discussed the comments throwing Fields under the bus for a lost season. It wasn’t the only time Johnson
has taken direct aim at a quarterback in the press.
New York Jets owner Woody Johnson was not impressed with Zach Wilson’s performance in the wake of the season-ending injury quarterback Aaron Rodgers suffered in Week 1 of the 2024 campaign.
“You need a backup quarterback,” Johnson told reporters Thursday, per ESPN’s Rich Cimini. “We didn’t have one last year.”
Inevitably fans hear about things like this and ask what the big deal is. Johnson is just saying what the fans are thinking, right? Guys like Fields, White, Wilson, and Ulbrich are bad at their jobs.
Well, there’s a reason fans don’t run NFL teams. You don’t want your owner to sounds like the dude calling into WFAN. Maybe these employees of yours aren’t particularly effective, but word gets around in the NFL. If you don’t treat your people with respect, it makes it a lot harder to recruit free agents and hire quality staff. Who wants a boss who constantly disrespects them in this way? In case you haven’t noticed, the Jets have had a really difficult time attracting quality people. The classless behavior is probably a reason.
And it’s worth saying that your job performance hasn’t exactly been above reproach, Woody. Sayings about glass houses apply.
So you have a new job. You are to change your ways and start acting with class. When you go into the locker room, you will only thank the players and coaches for their effort and congratulate them when they accomplish something good. Your public comments will contain praise, and the only negative words you will speak when the team struggles will be how it starts at the top, and you need to do better as an owner.
You can’t always control whether your team wins or loses, but you can control whether this team presents itself in a professional way. Times need to change with this team.
Recommendation #4: Hymie Elhai is fired.
Hymie Elhai is currently the team president. His official job responsibilities entail running the business side of the franchise.
You might find his firing to be odd for two reasons. First, for all of their struggles on the field the Jets have had plenty of success on the business side. Second, Elhai’s domain doesn’t involve that on field product.
To address the first of these issues, I will simply note that a team like the Jets making money is not necessarily a sign of any brilliance. The way the NFL is set up currently, franchises are money printing machines. The fact the Jets can be managed the way they are and still achieve financial success is clear proof.
However, the team’s relations with its most loyal customers are at an all-time low. The Jets are uncompetitive years after year in a league built for parity. The team has a terrible stadium experience and charges unfathomable prices for it. Heck, the Jets even recently disqualified a long-term season ticket holder from a contest taking place during a game until public shaming forced them to reverse that decision.
In the big picture, the Jets’ issues with their fans can only be fixed by putting a better product on the field. We will work on that later on.
Still there are things the team can do to start mending fences with its most loyal customers.
You can’t have season ticket holders going to games every single year in November and December sitting next to people who paid 70% less for tickets on secondary ticket sites.
Incredibly the Jets continue to raise their ticket prices every year. In the few instances where the team comments on its rationale, the excuse seems to be that other NFL teams are raising their prices so the Jets need to do that to keep pace.
The Jets raising their prices because other NFL teams do is like charging filet mignon prices for ground chuck because they’re both beef.
The team should start instituting steep discounts for long-time season ticket holders as an act of good faith for the bad football and inflated prices in the past 15 years. The longer a fan has held tickets during that stretch, the steeper the discount should be.
The Jets should also look at ways to improve concessions at the stadium. That means both improving the quality and developing more affordable options.
In the longer run, there should be a look at ways to make the stadium experience better. And if issues like parking, transportation, and reducing the lines to enter the stadium are too difficult to overcome, it’s time to start looking at options for a new home stadium.
Look, maybe I’m naive. Maybe brand loyalty is so strong, and the NFL is such a financial juggernaut that none of this matters. In the long run, I just can’t imagine that the Jets can continue to treat their loyal fans in such a shabby way and see no consequences to the business side. The fact we are having this discussion is a mark against Hymie Elhai in his official role.
That brings us to the second point. There have long been rumors that Mr. Elhai’s influence goes far beyond his job titles and that he has been one of the most trusted confidants of ownership when it comes time to make major decisions. There might not be a smoking gun, but there certainly is a lot of smoke to suggest Elhai has had a hand in many of the disastrous football decisions that have turned the Jets into the laughing stock of the league.
Either way, the disastrous handling of fan relations are grounds for termination. We will make this move for what we know he has done wrong on the business side and his probable culpability for the football side.
I know, Woody, that you won’t like this. Hymie Elhai is a trusted advisor. That’s exactly why we can’t have him near you giving terrible counsel anymore.
If you’re unhappy with this decision, maybe you should have thought about these things before you ran this franchise into the ground.
Recommendation #5: Move on from Aaron Glenn.
I won’t lie. This one hurts.
If you were a Jets fan during the late 1990s or early 2000s, you probably love Aaron Glenn. He was probably one of your favorite players. The Glenn story is a good example of why its always dangerous to bring a team legend back to handle a role he has never held before.
Let’s be clear. There are real drawbacks to firing a coach after one season. It causes damage to a franchise and makes the future less clear.
Still, those negatives are less damaging than continuing with a coach who has shown he simply is in over his head.
Could Aaron Glenn figure it out over the next two years? Of course anything is possible.
Is there anything substantive that should lead us to believe that is a good bet? I can’t say I see any. Glenn’s first season was one of the worst in franchise history. The Jets lost by more on average than Rich Kotite’s disastrous 1996 team did. The Jets didn’t intercept a pass all season long. They didn’t have a 400 yard receiver.
More than that, I don’t see any positive attribute we can hang our hat on to believe Glenn can quickly grow into the job. What aspect of being a head coach has Glenn shown talent for? Is he good at game planning? Does he develop quality schemes? Does he build a good coaching staff? Has he shown an ability to develop players?
I think we would be hard-pressed to answer any of those with a yes.
When Glenn was hired, he was supposed to be a major culture builder. He was the defensive coordinator who guided Detroit through an unbelievable number of injuries in 2024.
What culture did the Jets have in 2025? They finished the season becoming the first team in NFL history to lose five straight games all by 23+ points in the same season.
Unfortunately there’s no there there with Glenn. Maybe one day he will be a good head coach. Few things would make me happier than to be wrong about him. But based on what we have seen to date, the best move is to move on with a new coach.
Recommendation #6: Darren Mougey doesn’t take over football operations.
Woody, you referred to Mougey as Glenn’s “sidekick” a year ago when you hired them both. It might seem like a natural move with Glenn out of the picture for Mougey to be handed the keys to football operation. That would entail allow him to choose the head coach of his choice along with full roster control.
We are going in a different direction, though.
I wouldn’t say that Mougey has proven himself to be a bad general manager. I don’t think he has done anything to deserve being fired. Still, the biggest argument for promoting him seems to be simply that he’s already in the building.
I’ll put it this way. The New York Jets are now a blank slate. You can theoretically pick anybody in the NFL to put in charge of football operations. Is Darren Mougey really your first choice?
There is a large portion of the Jets fanbase that seems to think Mougey is the next star general manager. The reality just doesn’t quite match the hype, however.
There are three major points made to talk Mougey up.
The first involve the major deals Mougey made at the trade deadline involving Sauce Garnder and Quinnen Williams. To hear many fans (and members of the media) tell it, these trades were the NFL version of bank heists.
I think part of this is because there is so little else to feel good about surrounding the franchise that we need something to hype up. Part of it is that in broad strokes you can see some similarities to the Jamal Adams trade in 2020 that was a legitimate grand slam for the Jets.
Maybe these trades will work out just as well as that one did for the Jets. It seems very premature to come to that conclusion today, however.
The Jets did add four premium Draft picks over the next two years in the two trades. If they hit on these picks creating an offensive infrastructure that can support a young quarterback, these deals could indeed turn the franchise around.
These picks didn’t just fall out of the sky, though. The Jets traded away two legitimate star level talents. Part of the reason the Adams trade turned into such a success was that his career started to crater by his second season in Seattle. The Jets added premium Draft capital for a high paid players who ceased to be even an effective NFL starter shortly thereafter. We don’t know that Garnder and Williams will have the same trajectory. Gardner was injured shortly after the trade, but Williams played really high level football after being sent to Dallas.
Additionally, the compensation the Jets received was not unprecedented despite the general sentiment that it was. The Gardner trade in particular has been declared one of the great steals in recent NFL memory by many pundits. But looking at other recent trades, I would say a 25 year old in his fourth year with two First Team All Pro nods should bring back a pair of first round picks. Anything less would be a ripoff.
I don’t think the Jets got poor value for Gardner or Williams. I think they got roughly in the ballpark of the trade compensation they should have received. Were these all-time hauls, though? Unless you really value Adonai Mitchell highly, the Jets didn’t even get more for Garnder than they did for Adams even though Garnder is a better player who handles a more important position.
Could you justify these deals? Sure, as part of a calculated gamble to reallocate talent onto offense to support a quarterback it’s easy enough to see the plan. But now the Jets need to hit on the resources they’ve added. It will take some smart work merely to replace the value Gardner and Williams provided with those new picks.
My point here is that you can justify the moves the Jets made, but at this point you can’t say they are the sort of masterstroke that should guarantee Mougey runs the ship going forward.
The second major point comes from Mougey’s first Draft class. Armand Membou, Mason Taylor, Azareye’h Thomas, Arian Smith, and Malachi Moore all saw significant snaps as rookies. Many Jets fans are talking up this class as one full of future starters.
Membou looks rock solid at right tackle. You can likely pencil him in going forward as part of the offensive line’s foundation. Beyond that you have a bunch of rookies who mainly were pressed into playing time because of how thin the roster was. These players all had ups and downs. They could potentially grow into quality starters, but it’s too early to declare that definitively based on what we have seen.
Similarly, Mougey made a number of trades to add players before and during the season such as Jowon Briggs, Jarvis Brownlee, John Metchie, and Adonai Mitchell. All of these players had a strong game or two early in their respective Jets careers. These acquisitions were immediately declared grand slams, starters acquired for cheap. The thing is all of the players aside from Briggs quickly fell back to earth.
My point here isn’t that Mougey has necessarily done a poor job. It just seems like two big trades, one Draft class, and smaller scale trades have all been proclaimed as evidence of his genius. In reality we don’t know yet how good these moves were.
I’m not ready to say Mougey is a bad GM at this point. I’m saying there isn’t enough to suggest that Mougey should be the guy put in charge given the options at our disposal.
Recommendation #7: Don’t overthink finding the franchise’s new leadership.
For now we will wait and see on Mougey. Many Jets fans have very specific ideas about what order in which the head coach and general manager should be hired or who should be the boss. We won’t worry about those things. The important things aren’t that the head coach reports to the general manager or the sequence of hirings. The focus should on making sure you have two competent people who can work together effectively and have the same vision.
There are a number of attractive head coaching candidates who are either currently on the market or who could be on the market soon. Our focus will be on hiring one of them. If they feel comfortable with Mougey, the current general manager can stay. If they would prefer somebody else, we will make a change.
Let’s get to our candidates.
John Harbaugh
Woody, two years ago I advised you to fire Robert Saleh and target Jim Harbaugh to replace him (with then Detroit Lions offensive coordinator Ben Johnson as the backup plan in case Harbaugh turned you down).
Instead you decided to stick with Saleh but only for five games. Then came twelve games of Jeff Ulbrich. Then came Aaron Glenn.
I humbly suggest that my plan might have been a tad better.
Now I know some might read this and think, “It doesn’t take a genius to suggest to hire Jim Harbaugh and Ben Johnson. Anybody could have suggested them.”
That’s the entire point!
We don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. If everybody knows a coach is a great, you should hire him. You don’t get bonus points for degrees of difficulty.
You might have been foolish enough to pass on one Harbaugh, but the universe is providing you with a rare second chance.
Jim’s brother John has parted ways with the Baltimore Ravens after a successful 18 year tenure in which he won over 60 percent of his games and a Super Bowl. During that time, Baltimore successfully developed two franchise quarterbacks, Joe Flacco and Lamar Jackson, with two very different playing styles.
Harbaugh is the rare coach who excels at old school football tasks like culture building yet is open-minded enough to adapt to modern approaches to the game and team building.
John Harbaugh is the closest thing the Jets can find to Bill Parcells in 1997, a coach who came in and instantly restored credibility to the franchise at one of its lowest moments.
Give Harbaugh whatever he wants to come to New York and coach the Jets.
Just as it was two years ago, your choice is obvious. You ignored the obvious choice two years ago. Don’t do it again.
Of course, Harbaugh will be highly coveted. He likely will have multiple offers. Despite our best efforts, he might choose another team. So we will need some backup options.
Mike Tomlin
If not for a missed field goal in Week 18, Harbaugh would definitely be coaching a game this weekend. It’s possible that Tomlin would be available, and that he would be the top choice.
There is still a possibility that he will hit the market. It feels like Tomlin’s tenure in Pittsburgh has hit a plateau. The Steelers still haven’t had a losing season in his almost two decade tenure, but it has been close to a decade since their last Playoff win. The Steelers also struggled to find a permanent solution at quarterback in the post-Ben Roethlisberger world, and don’t seem particularly close to solving that puzzle. If Pittsburgh loses at home to Houston, there is some speculation that Tomlin’s tenure could come to an end.
The issues I listed above are real. Tomlin has to take some of the blame for the way things have stagnated in Pittsburgh. For those reasons I’m not entirely sure the reality of Tomlin at this point matches the vast hype he receives.
He is, however, a very good coach who like Harbaugh would restore credibility to the Jets the instant he is hired.
Sometimes a coach needs a fresh start to energize him. But even if Tomlin was only good for 10 wins and a first round Playoff exit consistently, it would be an enormous step forward for the Jets.
Kevin Stefanski
Stefanski is not in the league of Harbaugh or Tomlin at this point. He is, however, a two-time Coach of the Year winner who seemed to have one of the league’s losingest franchises moving in the right direction before a very ill-advised trade.
Was Stefanski a driving force behind the deal for Deshaun Watson? Did he oppose it? The answer seems to vary depending on whom you believe.
Either way, sometimes an otherwise quality leader sees his tenure derailed by one big mistake or stroke of bad luck. They remain a quality leader and are fully capable of succeeding at their next stop.
I don’t think anybody can doubt that Stefanski has the ability to coach. He’s a good offensive mind and has integrated analytics into his decision-making deeply, which is the direction in which the league is moving. He would be a good fallback option should the Jets fail to land the big fish options Harbaugh or Tomlin.
Mike McCarthy
Stefanski himself might have other suitors. If all else fails, the Jets should turn their attention to McCarthy.
This is a recommendation that will likely be unpopular with a large portion of the fanbase. McCarthy is a polarizing figure who frequently provokes criticism.
One of the most common criticisms is that he only won a single Super Bowl with Aaron Rodgers as his quarterback. If we are being honest, it’s a pretty weak criticism. It isn’t easy to win a Super Bowl. Sean Payton is universally praised for winning a single Super Bowl with Drew Brees. Don Shula is one of the top ten coaches of all-time. None of his Super Bowl wins came during the era where Dan Marino is his quarterback.
Stronger criticisms of McCarthy are that his offense has fallen behind the times, and that his success might have had as much to do with the talent he was given as his coaching.
These are both fair and among the reasons McCarthy is a fallback plan rather than a top choice.
At the end of the day, however, McCarthy has 18 years of head coaching experience and a winning percentage over .600. Does that make him a great coach? Maybe not, but I think it’s impossible to not be a good coach and put up a record like that regardless of talent.
Even if you don’t believe McCarthy can lead the Jets to the Super Bowl (which is an odd critique because he’s one of the few available coaches who actually has a championship on his resume), there’s a lot to be said for somebody who would come in and know how to run a team on day one. There would be none of the growing pains we have seen over and over from first time head coaches. McCarthy could instill sorely lacking professionalism in the team’s operations.
If he only proves capable of taking the team to the Playoffs in a few years and can’t get over the hump, we can think about a change then. He will probably be ready to retire at that point anyway. But the Jets will be far better off than they are today.
Alec Halaby
If we strike out on all of these coaching candidates, we can take a new approach and try and find the best general manager candidate possible. Halaby has been the right hand man for Howie Roseman in Philadelphia, one of the best and more forward thinking organizations in the league.
It’s true that you never know for sure how somebody will adjust from being the second in command to being in the big chair. Jets fans learned this the hard way when another hyped Roseman lieutenant, Joe Douglas, failed in a tenure as Jets general manager.
Some might wonder why the Jets would even consider going down this path again.
While Douglas came to New York with much fanfare, in hindsight the reality just didn’t match the hype. Jets fans were sold on the idea that they were bringing in the architect of the 2017 Super Bowl Champion Eagles. However, the core of that team was largely in place when Douglas was hired in Philadelphia. The Eagles more than anything needed a culture change after the turbulent tenure of Chip Kelly. It’s true that Douglas was behind some solid moves on the pro personnel side, adding valuable role players through trades and free agency, but I think it’s fair to say in retrospect that his hand in making the Eagles a championship team was overstated. Philadelphia’s Draft record during the Douglas years was conspicuously spotty.
By comparison, Halaby by all accounts has been one of the driving forces in making the Eagles perhaps the league’s most cutting edge franchise. The Eagles have been ahead of the curve in everything from using analytics to inform game strategy and player evaluation to adopting player tracking data to optimize practice workloads. It would be nice for the Jets to start getting ahead of the curve for once instead of chasing the latest trends after the majority of the league has adopted them.
In a normal situation, Woody, I would never recommend Halaby because I know you would immediately lose faith the second a Jets beat writer mocked an unconventional move. But in your new role Halaby will have the space and time he needs to reconstruct the Jets from the ground up.
This still leaves the question of whom the head coach will be. It is difficult to say, but Halaby was a central part of a front office who has picked Super Bowl winning coaches in its last two hires. That should build confidence.
Halaby also could be a great fit as a general manager if some of our coaching candidates did accept our offer to coach the Jets. A Stefanski-Halaby duo could be one of the most futuristic thinking head coach-general manager combos in the league.
Recommendation #8: Look for two types of free agents.
Fortunately in the 2026 offseason, the Jets will finally begin to emerge from the wreckage of years of horrible financial management by Joe Douglas that clogged the team’s salary cap situation. Things won’t be fully fixed until 2027, but the Jets will at least have ample cap space this offseason to try and upgrade the roster.
This is a Jets team with holes up and down the roster.
This is all logical. The cap space is the result of the Jets shedding almost all of their big money veterans. That makes the roster largely a blank slate.
The Jets can’t expect to strike many bargain deals. Free agency is inherently a bad place for value. You are bidding against 31 other teams, some of whom have the same needs as you.
Additionally, the Jets have a bad reputation in the league. Simply put, players don’t want to be here. The constant losing and the owner are among the reasons for that.
To land players, the Jets will need to overpay. Let’s be clear about that.
The overpays should be targeted. There are two types the Jets should go after.
The first group is talented players seeking their second contract. These players are generally in their mid-20s and entering the prime of their careers.
There are three subgroups for these players.
The first is talented players who might have been used incorrectly by their former team but could thrive in a different system. Ironically, the player who comes to mind in this group is somebody already on the Jets, Breece Hall. Hall through his career has been used as a three down back and this past season as a volume runner on inside carries. We will count on our new coaching staff to use him in a way that better aligns with his talent, namely as part of a tandem with a heavy amount of his workload coming on outside runs and in the receiving game.
The second group to target is ascending players. These are players whose first four years as a whole haven’t been overwhelming but are showing a clear upward trajectory. Indianapolis’ Alec Pierce comes to mind in this group. Pierce has show steady improvement statistically and added new elements of his game on film consistently since entering the NFL. He just posted his first 1,000 yard season. He also plays a position, wide receiver, where the Jets have a dire need and is a deep threat, one of the few elements lacking in Garrett Wilson’s game.
The third group is elite level talent. These guys typically don’t hit free agency, but Ravens center Tyler Linderbaum could be an exception. Linderbaum would be a huge get for an offensive line that already has three young quality starters.
On top players entering their respective primes, the Jets should look to add veteran players who both fill needs and provide leadership. This past year the Jets went super young as they built their roster. That makes sense for a rebuilding team. They might have taken the approach too far, though. A team needs some veterans in the locker room to provide stability, show the young guys how things are done, and prevent the team from getting too low when things don’t go well.
Maybe it isn’t at the top of the list of reasons why things fell apart for the 2025 Jets, but it did feel like a lack of veteran leadership was a problem. The few veterans on the team for leadership like Josh Reynolds and Tyrod Taylor couldn’t help the team much on the field.
The Jets should go after players like Bears safety Kevin Byard and Browns guard Joel Bitonio among others if they choose both to continue their careers and hit the market. They both are still playing well into their 30s. They would fill glaring needs, and they have been been voted captains as elder statemen on their current teams.
Recommendation #9: Don’t pick a quarterback with the second overall pick in the 2026 NFL Draft.
I have no doubt this will be the most controversial of my recommendations. The Jets are in dire need of a quarterback. They will need to find one, most likely through the NFL Draft if they ever want to be a great team. Now they are sitting in the second slot in the Draft in prime position to take a top prospect.
How can they possibly turn this chance down?
I am sure people will start telling anecdotes about Drake Maye and the way he has turned the Patriots around.
Look, if the Jets pick Dante Moore or some other quarterback, it’s entirely possible that it will put the team on the path to glory. There are also plenty of stories warning about the pitfalls of taking the wrong quarterback.
The real questions are about the qualities of this year’s quarterback class and what is the best bet for the Jets.
At this point, Moore would likely be the player the Jets choose. He is a fine prospect. He is also only turning 21 in the spring and has less than two years of starting experience in college football. Of course it could work out, but it is a big risk taking player likely to be raw entering the league, putting all of the pressure on him to be the savior of the franchise, and throwing him onto the field with a roster that won’t be completely built even if we do everything right.
On top of this, we have to consider where the Jets currently are. You might think the Jets are sitting on an excess of Draft capital. In some ways that is true. The team holds four of the top 44 picks in the 2026 NFL Draft. However, because of the trade for Haason Reddick in 2024 and the trade up for Tyler Baron in 2025, the team is currently projected to have
just a single pick between selections 45 and 175. That means the Jets have five of the first 174 picks, a normal allotment. Maybe those picks come earlier than normal, but it still isn’t enough for a team with so many glaring needs.
The Jets need to find impact players in the Draft to fully build their team. The picks in the first two rounds give them a chance to do that. But they also need to find the role players, quality starters, and yes the occasional star that is acquired in rounds three through five. Given the glaring needs on the roster, the Jets need an excess amount of picks in these rounds. Currently they have a vast deficit.
I know it’s easy to scoff at the idea that third through fifth rounds are important, but building a winning team in the NFL often comes down to getting the unglamorous stuff right.
The Jets will have two golden opportunities to trade down and add the picks that they need. One will be with the opening pick in round two, 33rd overall. After night one, the team is sure to receive calls from teams that have assessed their boards and have a specific prospect in mind. Still a trade of pick 33 won’t provide the potential gold mine that will result from trading down from 2 with a team that wants Moore. Teams usually overpay drastically moving up into the top two for a quarterback. The Jets can reap the rewards.
Moore might be a good prospect, but he’s not the last quarterback prospect the Jets can even expect to land. The team has the option of picking a quarterback later on in the Draft. There also is the matter of the three first round picks for 2027 currently in the team’s possession, a number that could grow with a trade down.
A trade down won’t permanently rob the Jets of a chance to add a franchise quarterback. It will put them in a position to put a truly competitive roster around the quarterback they eventually do take.
It’s going to take guts to do this, though, Woody. There will be criticism. We know you couldn’t handle this on your own. Aren’t you glad you have a new role?
Recommendation #10: Have the diamond “Woody and the Jets” chain destroyed.
Fortunately we have seen far less of this monstrosity over the last two years, but the new management of the team won’t be able to live with the idea that this chain exists in the world much less that it was created because of the New York Jets.
I don’t want to get overly spiritual here, but if a higher power actually exists somewhere in the universe, it’s possible that it won’t allow the Jets to be good again as long as the chain exists.
That’s a chance we simply can’t take.
Have the chain destroyed, Woody.
Woody, I have given you the blueprint. I have no doubt your instinct is to do the opposite of everything I have suggested.
But there’s a reason
I call you the NFL’s George Costanza. Your instinct is always wrong. Maybe one day you’ll figure out that following the exact opposite of your instinct will be what leads you to success.
Maybe that day you will follow a plan like the one I have laid out. If you need me, you know how to get in touch.
