The Jets Are Going Full Scorched Earth Again

GM Joe Douglas has been fired with seven weeks to go, and the next rebuild will be even more difficult than the last.

Douglas addresses the media during the introductory press conference for Aaron Rodgers in 2023 / Tom Horak-Imagn Images

Really and truly, we’re about to find out what it’s like when you burn it all to the ground. Forget about NFL platitudes, words like rebuild and retool. Forget about promising a new dawn or a new era. Forget about the typical NFL rebirth cycle in which a new head coach and quarterback can help silence the echoes of prior mistakes and ineptitude. This is raw, scorched earth. This is rocks and rubble; an absolute barren graveyard where good thoughts and vibes once existed. What the New York Jets are doing cannot be described as anything other than arson. 

We’re about to find out what happens when you fire your head coach five weeks into the season, a game out of first place, after having lost patience following losses to the Denver Broncos (currently the No. 7 seed in the AFC playoff race) and the Minnesota Vikings (sporting a historically good defense) by one score each. We’re about to find out what happens when, after that, you absolutely kneecap the promising career of a great defensive coordinator and prospective head coach, who was thrust into utter chaos as an interim coach with little in the way of resources and a 40-year-old quarterback still trying to find his groove. We’re about to find out what happens when, after that, you fire a general manager with mere weeks remaining on his contract; the kind of guy who was warned about this place, was a good soul, a football mind and a promising personnel man who brought the franchise an Offensive and Defensive Rookie of the Year in the same draft class. Joe Douglas, who was fired Tuesday afternoon, had his hits and misses, but he did not deserve to be tossed out the door with a little more than a month remaining in the season. No one does. 

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There seems to be some kind of belief nowadays that this is how we move forward. We pillage. We plunder. We put up a middle finger when something doesn’t suit our exact specifications. We ignore the bigger picture and we assume that the next soothsayer will save us. But I don’t know who is coming to save the Jets. I don’t know who would want to. Some things are best kept behind caution tape so as not to infect the lot of us. 

We will rationalize Douglas’s firing because of his record (30–64), the same way we rationalized Robert Saleh’s firing. Of course, the record does not reflect the work that it took to clean up from the last torch job; the last manmade comet that smashed into this building, pitting a coach and a general manager against one another and sinking the roster into an abyss. Adam Gase, Le’Veon Bell, Mike Maccagnan … it sounds like another line from the franchise’s own “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” 

And this one will be worse. Because of the frantic pressure to nuke this team into a contender, most of the young, tentpole talent will be astronomically expensive by the time the Jets are ready to sniff a meaningful game. How did it feel to necessitate trading Darrelle Revis? Are you ready for that to happen to Sauce Gardner and Garrett Wilson, too? By the time the Jets move on from Aaron Rodgers, find their next quarterback and get the roster settled, Gardner will come up in a market that’s offering $25 million per season for top cornerback talent. Wilson? Try $35 million for a top wide receiver.

Gardner is a player I feel especially sorry for. He arrived hell bent on changing this culture and carrying the badge of Recruiter in Chief with pride. He eschewed the set-in-concrete narrative about this team and its past because he was empowered by Saleh to do so.

Now, he, Wilson and Quinnen Williams don’t feel all that different from Revis, from Muhammad Wilkerson, from Damon Harrison, from Sheldon Richardson, from Sam Darnold, from Jamal Adams, from any other player that came into this building and made hardened old hearts skip a beat for a moment before they, too, were smothered by this cyclical nightmare of firings and chaos. They, too, thought there was a chance they could build something here. To be a part of the turnaround. They, too, had to find the light somewhere else. 

I don’t mean to sound alarmist after the firing of a 30–64 general manager. But boy do I hope there’s a plan this time. Boy do I hope the strongman approach can fix this place. While I don’t subscribe to the theory that living and working in perpetual fear gets the best out of someone, I hope the next group of bright-eyed folks who take a job there can exist in this kind of environment one that not only kicks you out unceremoniously but forces you to prove yourself somewhere else before people excuse that black hole on your résumé. 

What happens next, at least in the coming weeks, is anyone’s guess. But we can take some sort of strange comfort in knowing how it’s going to finish. Rocks and rubble. Toasted earth. 

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