As the minutes were ticking down on the Jets’ season this evening, Phil Simms (or his counterpart, they blend together) wondered out loud how the Jets could fire a coach who had just finished a nine-win season.
Oh that’s easy: “You’re fired.”
That’s a phrase that Woody Johnson should utter this week.
But to answer the question more broadly: Nine wins is not a safety threshold–10 wins is; if the Jets had won today you could make a case for Mangini getting one more season to learn his craft.
Instead nine wins earns a head coach a close look at their record. Mangini’s does not bear up under scrutiny:
- The Jets were positioned to make a playoff run with a month to go, and, with a fairly easy schedule remaining, challenge for a first round bye. Instead the team lost four of five games, winning the one only because Dick Jauron is a flat out incompetent coach, as opposed to the merely mediocre Mangini.
- The Jets’ losses this season came to deplorably bad teams–the Raiders, the 49ers, the Seahawks–and beatably mediocre ones like the Chargers and the Broncos. And these weren’t freak, bad luck losses: The team was flat and ill-prepared.
- Brett Favre was a disaster down the stretch, but the fault was not his alone. The game plans on both sides of the ball were often mind-boggingly poor. Leon Washington, the most dynamic player on the team and the offense’s only home run threat, would disappear for whole games. The pass rush disappeared in the season’s second half and Defensive Coordinator Bob Sutton refused to supplement it with blitzers. Oh yeah, and in the four games after the Jets beat Tennessee they seemed to be trying to save themselves for the playoffs by not actually tackling. Favre was bad, but so too was the rest of the team. When a team collectively rolls over like that, it goes to the person charged with preparing them and putting them in a position to succeed.
- Here’s the bottom line: Eric Mangini was given a team with enough talent to send seven players to the Pro Bowl–that’s more than any other team. He managed to navigate that team through a soft schedule to … nine wins.
Time now for one more loss.
December 29th, 2008
And looks like the Jets listen when Herr Schlesingbrenner speaks: Mangini out in NY.
December 29th, 2008
I couldn’t disagree more.
The Jets had 8-8 talent and went 9-7. That shouldn’t warrant a firing of a coach who had 2 winning seasons in 3 years.
The main culprit for the Jets in 2008 was the INT-machine himself, Brett Favre, who averaged 2 INTs per game over the past 2 months. Mangini never wanted Favre, and now he gets fired. Good call Tannenbaum, good call Johnson.
Jet fans are going to realize what I realized 8 years ago, and Packer fans about 2 years ago. Favre sucks. He is probably the most overrated (not worst, he is a clear HOF’er, just overrated) player in NFL history. Over the last 8 seasons, in December and January games, he has been an absolute turnover machine.
That’s not Eric Mangini’s fault.
As for the 7 Pro Bowlers, please. Fans vote on the pro bowl. All you have to know about the Pro Bowl is Brett Favre is going and Chad Pennington isn’t. That’s a joke.