Five thoughts on the Jets firing general manager Joe Douglas

The firing of general manager Joe Douglas was both a surprise and not a surprise. A change didn’t seem to be imminent after the Jets were defeated by the Indianapolis Colts in Week 11. However, Douglas was in the final year of the six year contract he signed in 2019. The Jets were a horrible disappointment in a season where his job was unanimously viewed to be on the line. We will continuing discussing the implications of this general manager change plenty in the days ahead, but here are five initial thoughts.

Joe Douglas deserved to be fired.

I think it is difficult to argue the firing of Douglas was unjustified based on the results. The Jets’ record during his tenure was 30-64. The team did not have a single winning season. The Jets were not even alive in the Playoff race once in the final week of the regular season.

Douglas’ failures were broad. He whiffed on the two most important decisions any general manager can make, quarterback and head coach. Both Zach Wilson and Robert Saleh will be remembered as major misjudgments. A general manager might be able to survive getting one of these two wrong, but it is rare to survive missing on both.

He had many notable free agent misses from Laken Tomlison to CJ Uzomah to Allen Lazard. His drafting record was also spotty aside from an outstanding 2022 class. Still he drafted no above average starters during his tenure outside the top 40 picks other than Michael Carter II.

Additionally, we saw poor process on everything from salary cap management to his tendency to trade up frequently in the early rounds of the NFL Draft.

This isn’t to say Douglas did nothing well in his tenure. Due mainly to that 2022 Draft class, he will leave behind more building blocks than any of his recent predecessors. It just wasn’t enough.

There was nothing wrong with the timing.

I have seen some questioning of the “when” of this firing. If your premise is that the Jets should have fired both Douglas and Saleh after the 2023 season, I cannot argue with you.

But other than that, I don’t see any issue with the Jets making this move right now. The Jets have made a number of major in-season decisions in 2024, more than any team in recent memory. For most of these decisions the timing has indeed seemed odd. Firing Robert Saleh after five weeks left plenty of questions about the impact of shuffling the coaching staff. Those questions have not been answered in a positive way. The trade for Davante Adams at a point when the Jets were 2-4 and falling out of the postseason race was odd to put it generously.

I can’t tell you exactly why Woody Johnson chose this point to make the change, but is unlikely to have a major negative impact on the team.

For starters, the season is lost. The Jets are 3-8 and going nowhere.

In any event, a general manager change does not impact the day to day operation of a team the way firing the head coach and promoting the defensive coordinator did.

We all knew Douglas wasn’t coming back anyway. He was in the final year of his contract. It seemed from afar as though he had been stripped of authority. The Jets didn’t want him back. He didn’t want to be back.

If anything, this will give the Jets a small head start in trying to fill the job.

That job is not going to be easy to fill.

Whenever the challenges the Jets will face finding a quality candidate are discussed, people seem to get a bit dismissive. They point out it is a general manager position in the National Football League. It is only one of 32 jobs at the pinnacle of the profession.

Don’t get me wrong. These are fair points. The Jets will undoubtedly find somebody who will take the job. We can hope that person will turn into a quality hire. It is possible.

Still the Jets have done everything in their power to make this job as unattractive as possible to potential applicants.

The team is in a bad cap situation with roster challenges. I don’t think these are necessarily that different from what other teams face. Most of the time a general manager job is open because the team is bad. Good teams are happy with their general managers.

Rather the Jets’ issues come from ownership. Within hours of Douglas’ firing, The Athletic put out an explosive expose on the let’s say meddling and erratic behavior of owner Woody Johnson.

Your mileage may vary on how much you believe each individual accusation. However, even had the article not been published, it has been clear from afar that Johnson has been a destabilizing and heavy handed presence of late.

General manager candidates largely will have plans to disentangle messy cap situations and improve talent deficits. The big question many have is whether ownership will allow them to see those plans through.

In the case of Woody Johnson, there is no affirmative answer. He has been the driving force behind big move after big move. He fired the head coach with little to no input from the general manager. He seemingly unilaterally intervened to negotiate a contract with a high profile defensive end. He pushed through a trade for a high profile wide receiver. And none of this even goes into what happened at the quarterback position a year ago.

Maybe no candidates will be scared off. Maybe the top guys will be confident they can do an effective enough job to prevent Johnson from intervening.

I’m just saying that if you were to create a set of circumstances that maximized the odds of top candidates lacking interest in the Jets, you couldn’t do better than to follow Woody Johnson’s actions the last two years.

It’s hard enough under normal circumstances to land a good general manager without adding obstacles to the search.

Joe Douglas didn’t come off well in the expose from The Athletic.

One interesting aspect of the aforementioned expose from The Athletic is the perception that the authors were doing the bidding of Joe Douglas.

Now in fairness, there is reason to be suspicious when an article so critical of the owner comes out just hours after the general manager is fired. It seems plausible if not likely that Douglas or people close to him could have been sources.

That said, the article was no puff piece for Douglas. In fact, it didn’t paint him in a flattering light at all.

The Athletic expose paints the picture of a general manager who largely checked out after one of his top lieutenants was fired last offseason and another departed for a different team. To me that seems like startlingly unprofessional behavior. This is the NFL. Things like that happen. Say what you will about Robert Saleh. He certainly did a lot of things poorly as Jets head coach. But when one of his most valued assistants (and a personal friend) Mike LaFleur was pushed out two years ago, he didn’t just stop working hard.

The article also suggests that Douglas was to blame for the Haason Reddick holdout. It states that Reddick’s agents warned Douglas not to trade for the star defensive end unless he was willing to negotiate a new contract. Douglas figured he could work it out, and the rest is history.

Finally, the Jets were apparently the only team in the league to offer Tyron Smith a contract. Based on the low quality of his play this year, it is fair to question whether everybody else realized Smith’s productive days were over. The article suggests that Douglas was under the impression Woody Johnson wanted Smith, but the owner’s ties to this move seem wildly speculative and superficial compared with anecdotes from the rest of the article.

The Joe Douglas Era will be remembered as a massive disappointment.

When Douglas was hired in 2019, expectations could not have been higher. This went beyond the normal optimism that accompanies any general manager hire. The national media pumped up Douglas as the league’s next great GM. He had learned from two of the league’s most forward thinking executives, Ozzie Newsome and Howie Roseman.

Unfortunately, the results just did not match the praise. It felt like every year, the national media declared the Jets were one of the winners of the offseason. The roster was supposed to be greatly improved, and the major holes were supposed to be filled. With most things during Joe Douglas’ tenure, there was more sizzle than steak. The results on the field came nowhere close to matching the expectations.

Now the Jets are left to start over.

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