Sperm Edwards

I don't know. Failing to trade a player for those picks is the same as trading high picks away for that player. If the Jets had a pair of 1s this year, and had the team they have today plus a hole at SS, I don't think you or I or anyone would be advocating trading one of them (plus maybe more) for Adams with 1 year left on his rookie contract plus a top-10 pick's team option for 2021. It's hardly always a disaster. Teams do it if the time is right and they have needs different than the player: If Richardson wasn't traded for a gift 2nd rounder from Seattle I don't think it means the Jets don't move up from #6 in the spring; it just means they trade yet another future 1st rounder to do so (since possibly we'd have started out with a lower slot than 6; who knows). Of course that future 1st rounder became Quinnen Williams, who's a backup so far, so there's that. I'm not at all upset with the Leo trade either (though they should have dumped him earlier when his value was higher, but Maccagnan wasn't going to move one of his only "hits" in his 4 prior drafts at that point). They weren't extending him anyway at that point, as were they already on the hook for his full salary, so the extra pick and the little bit of cap relief was found money. Trading Revis for a 1st & more was also the right move at the time, even if it was unpopular (made that much more unpopular when he signed and won a SB with NE). He wasn't particularly good that year coming off his injury (hence the hefty pay cut a year later), and was very available as a UFA the following March. And we should have traded Mo for draft picks instead of sticking to our guns and insisting he was worth more than anyone was willing to surrender; leading to one of the worst contracts the team has ever handed out (which is saying something). These are the only examples I can think of where the Jets traded (or should have traded) proven players for draft picks. They all turned out (or would have turned out) for the better so far. 4 out of 4. There aren't many more examples because there aren't a lot of teams looking to trade draft picks for Jets' veterans. Who was the last proven starter traded for picks before that, Eric Barton over a decade ago? Only one I can think of that really blew up in our face was Pete Kendall even longer ago and that was due to a special/personal situation not because of draft pick acquisition. Just saying I think it's case by case, not a self-imposed rule that must not be broken.

You can’t know. Maybe they’d have lost a game or more that they ended up winning. Different players, different gameplan, different motivation, different gameplan/effort from the opponents not looking forward to a cakewalk game against the (then) 1 or 2 win Jets; impossible to say. It’s convenient, but it doesn’t work that way where you start with the known end results you like, and start tacking on wins from there. Case in point: no injuries also means a whole season of Osemele and Kalil and Winters. Maybe Enunwa drops a pair of would-be game winning touchdowns. Maybe lots of things. Maybe they’d have been 7-7 or better at this point. Maybe they’d have the exact same record. Maybe worse. The team - particularly its line - wasn’t good to begin with.

Out of curiosity, why would Anderson sign for less right now, and bypass the free agency period he’s been waiting for his whole career? The way you get him signed now is if you bid (or outbid) what he’s expected to get in free agency. The time for early-shopper discounts on him was before the season (if not a full year calendar year ago or more) when he had a serious injury risk and hadn’t made any money yet. Or at worst, while his numbers were down at the midseason point, but the team can still see what others don’t behind the scenes. I’m sympathetic, but they’re not getting him locked up for under $10MM/year. Only way that happens at this point is if he hits free agency and no one else bids that much, making $9.5MM the top offer.

His first son, Lamar Jackson, Jr.?

Totally unrelated, my next thread was to ask if anyone knew what Darnold’s passer rating was on Thursday. I don’t get the paper delivered anymore, and anyway it would have been wet from the rain. Help a guy out.

Nice failure on the apples to apples comparison after glossing over what I asked you. How many great players did Macc draft in his first 2 drafts? How many AVERAGE players did he draft in his first 2 drafts FFS? Outside the top 6 picks, Shell is the closest and he stinks. How many top 6 picks did Idzik have? Zero. How many did Maccagnan have? Four. How many great players - who were considered by anybody to be top 10 picks at the time - were sitting there at his one and only top 10 pick? Also as much as I’m certainly no Darnold hater, the truth is he’s ”potentially” (your word) as likely to be great as he is to be an average or below average, mistake-prone, choking, feast or famine QB. I’m not ready to label him as such yet, but you’re the one talking potential. This is as much as I’ll get into an argument over which GM was the lesser-polished turd, but no one is worse than Maccagnan.

List the draft picks from Maccagnan’s first 2 drafts if you want to compare apples to apples. Then factor in how piss poor the top half of the 2013 draft was for everyone outside the top 5. I’m not starting an “Idzik was a great drafter” thread anytime soon, but no one is worse than Maccagnan. He just got 5 years to pile up more selections is all. Regardless, no one on earth‘s “by far” worse than Maccagnan.

Adams was not a good pick in context. Not when the team needed a QB and two fast-maturing-to-stud QBs were sitting right there. Plus we’d have our badly-needed additional 1st rounder and three more 2nd rounders to use to help build around either one of them. Watson or Mahomes in 2017 + 2018 first rounder + two 2018 second rounders + 2019 second rounder + breaking in a young QB a full NFL season earlier (i.e. not fully wasting another season) OR Adams + Darnold Adams may be a good player, and a successful pick in general (certainly the opportunity was there to make worse picks) but he was a lousy, shortsighted pick for the Jets given the team’s circumstance at the time. FFS in his best season the team has already been listening to midseason trade offers for him. Why? Because no matter how highly anyone thinks of him he’s still just a freaking safety — even with him playing well, the team is still a huge loser in 3 seasons out of 3. Given the circumstances at the time, made worse still by knowing how easy/perfectly it was set up for us (there were only 3 QBs with top 10 consideration in 2017, and the only one off the board by the time we picked was the bad one; we couldn’t have gone wrong with either of them). As to your math in terms of his picks, you are 100% spot on but his history is actually worse when you consider how difficult it is to screw up a top-6 pick compared to the rest of the draft below it, and how he wasn’t even making picks to help the team so much as which player was least likely to turn into a bust way up there. What’s his success rate when selecting outside the top 6 picks in the draft? It’s disgusting is what it is. Worse than a 9 year-old who never watches college games - and has personally scouted nobody, has no experience, and has no NFL-level resources - simply making blind BPA picks based on averaging the rankings from a few well-regarded (or not even well-regarded) draft websites. Poison. Maccagnan was franchise poison.

This. If it’s too early to grade others as busts, it’s too early to grade this one a success. If health was no concern it seems he’d have been drafted earlier. If he’s healthy for no more than 5 games going forward is it still a good pick? Not particularly. Was Milliner? FFS a year ago today some people were still calling Darron Lee a good pick. Ù Too early. If he stays on the field consistently for years then we’ll start jerking him off for a good pick.

The one that signed a prenup, preferably

Crazy. Especially when he saw Coughlin win a SB as a lame duck coach in the same freaking stadium. There's no cap $ for it, and it a pittance compared to all the players that bust for them every year, so it doesn't mean anything to me if an additional $4MM or $8MM of Johnson's money went to Bowles (nor an equal amount to Maccagnan) after they were fired. What concerns me is that CJ had enough confidence in one or both of them for an extension to even enter his mind. And this is supposed to be the "smarter" Johnson brother? Yeesh.

So... finish eating the final year of the Bowles extension finish eating the final year of the Maccagnan extension eat 3 more years of Gase eat 5 more years of Douglas before he's allowed to go through his first spring FA period or first draft Fully guarantee $100MM for Newsome, from age 64-73, without his righthand man of the last ~15 years plus share of ownership of a $3-4BN team? This is not a good idea. As a friend, my advice to you, should you ever come to own the team, is to let your wife run it.

I don't know. I've not been one to dump on his every mistake, but it doesn't mean nothing any more than every game means nothing once we're eliminated. It still means nothing even if we won, from that point of view. It means something because he's supposed to be advancing and improving at a certain pace, and Gase's reaction suggests he really screwed up. Gase is a ****ing tool, but I'm quite sure he could see the pressure on that play as well as any casual fan, so that was not likely the reason he was so animated. More likely reason is Darnold was expected to do something he didn't - possibly if not likely before the snap - and not merely that he was supposed to make an improbable (and ultimately irrelevant) play when they were down by 21 very late.

I still think it depends. If we're losing games because he fell apart throwing crunch time picks? Sure. If it's because the D gave up the winning score a few times after the offense left the field with what should have been the game winning score? No. QB may be the most important piece on the team, but it is still a team sport not a QB sport. Case in point, whether he'd reached your prior minimum stat standards or the ones you just listed above, on most of those 2012-2017 Saints teams, they probably would have won just 4-6 games instead of the whopping 7 they did. Finger-pointing about the QB's inadequacies would happen, even though any QB could be crushing it like Brees in his prime and the team would still be losers year after year. He needs to show he was worth the #3 pick (or #6 pick and a trio of 2nd rounders), and so far he hasn't. I'm neither optimistic nor pessimistic about him just because of the circumstances of the team and coaching around him. Even still, I'd tend to judge him during and after each season rather than a line in the sand in advance when there are so many variables.

Likelihood is Gase isn't getting fired after 2020 either. Not unless there's a mutiny and/or he goes 4-12 or worse, with a generally healthy roster, and getting players he pushed for getting (and dumping/trading) in FA and the draft. He'll get to say they're still working on purging the prior regime's poison and it takes more than 1-2 years. FFS that's what people said for 3+ years when Maccagnan/Bowles were hired. So far I'm decidedly unimpressed, but his put up or shut up season will be 2021 whether any of us like it or not. Knew in November last year they were firing Bowles, and were already searching and talking to some candidates. Then after finally dumping Bowles, Chris Johnson brags about what a big splash the next HC hire is going to be after this exhaustive/lengthy search process is over. And he hires the guy the Dolphins fired after just 3 seasons, because he once used to call/do whatever Peyton Manning wanted.