Jets owner just doesn't get it
Posted: Friday, January 02, 2009 6:10 PM
Lots of things can mess up a football team – injuries, bad coaching, disruptive players, mistakes, sloppy play. But to really screw up a team, it takes an owner who thinks he knows more than the professionals he hired to run the team.
Exhibit A is Al Davis in Oakland. Exhibit B is Bill Ford in Detroit. Exhibit C has been the Bidwill family in Arizona. But with the Cardinals in the playoffs, there’s a new Barney Fife in the town sheriff’s office – Woody Johnson.
If you believe the anonymous sources close to the character involved – and it’s more fun to believe them than not to – the Jets owner has already chased off Bill Cowher, the best potential replacement for fired coach Eric Mangini.
Cowher proved himself as one of the best coaches in the game when he took the Pittsburgh Steelers to the Super Bowl with Neil O’Donnell as his quarterback. He finally won the big game with Ben Roethlisberger at the helm, and in between he made the playoffs with a bunch of nobodies running things.
But Johnson told Cowher – again, according to those famously anonymous sources – that if he wanted to coach the Jets, he’d have to do it with Brett “My Bad” Favre under center.
I’ve no idea why Johnson wants Favre back next year. You’d think one year leading the league in interceptions would be enough for him. You’d also think the owner would notice that many of his players don’t particularly like Favre or appreciate his efforts to be the designated hero.
You’d think a 61-year-old tycoon who’s spent his life hanging out with titans of industry and entertainment would be beyond going all goggle-eyed over a quarterback. But Johnson acts very much like someone who is so star struck, he’s incapable of noticing that Favre is no longer the greatest quarterback in the game. He’s not even the 10th greatest anymore.
If Johnson knew anything about football, he’d realize he needs to move on. Hiring Favre seemed like a good idea at the time, but it didn’t work. It’s time to thank Favre for his efforts, promise to write a nice letter of recommendation, and move on. He wasn’t the answer in 2008 at the age of 39, and he won’t be the answer in 2009 at the age of 40.
We now know it goes beyond the 22 interceptions he heaved up last year. His teammates have been busy telling newspapers in three states that Favre had his own office at the team’s training facilities where he spent his time, preferring not to mix with his teammates in the locker room or even to go out with them after hours.
This is wrong on every level. Players don’t have their own offices. The locker room is their office. When former players talk about what they miss most about the game, the first thing nearly every one of them mentions is hanging out with their teammates and the camaraderie of the locker room. The games are second. None mention hanging out in their office avoiding everyone else.
But for Favre, what’s important is being a hero, throwing the big pass that wins the game. And if he throws the big interception that loses the game, that’s okay, too, as long as he’s the one throwing it.
That’s what apparently hacks off his teammates. They feel Favre demanded that the offense revolve around him instead of the running of Thomas Jones. They blame him for Mangini’s firing and the team’s monumental collapse down the stretch.
I’ll grant that the teammates wouldn’t care if they’d won the AFC East and gone to the playoffs. And if he comes back next year and wins his first seven games, they’ll profess to love him like a stepbrother. But if, as is more likely, he loses a game early with two or four really dumb interceptions, they’ll turn on him. They’ll talk to the papers and the resulting uproar will make anything Terrell Owens ever did look like child’s play.
It’s all but inevitable that something ugly like that will happen if Favre comes back. The new coach will be compelled to take his orders from the quarterback just so the owner can have a hero to show off to his rich pals. And you know he’s coming back.
You also know it’s inevitable that Favre will come back. He’ll do it because of all the folks like myself telling him to just go away. That’s how it was in Green Bay. That’s how it will be in New York.
