Due to reporting from The Athletic's resident football pot-stirrer Dianna Russini and co-conspirator Zack Rosenblatt, we now realize that Aaron Rodgers is only partly to blame for the New York Jets being the latest iteration of the New York Jets—and yes, everyone knows what that means. Their recent reporting reveals that superannuated yet still overmatched owner Woody Johnson has also stamped his footprint right in the middle of the mudslide which led Tuesday to the firing of general manager Joe Douglas, only six weeks after he fired head coach Robert Saleh. What was already a typically Jetsy situation has only continued to get more Jetsy.
Now, the report could just be an act of reputational sanitation on Rodgers’s behalf, although that scale of clean-up job would require more than a double byline, plus we have no evidence that either author is particularly keen on Rodgers one way or another. According to Rosenblatt and Russini (we're switching billboard credits because we don't know who did more heavy lifting on this), Johnson broached the subject of benching Rodgers for backup quarterback Tyrod Taylor earlier this season, only to be talked off that particular comedic ledge by everyone else in the room. You may now talk among yourselves on the subject of whether Johnson might not be a genius, or just someone who has watched Rodgers closely this year. But frankly, everyone is ignoring the central fact, which is that no matter what the cast of characters shows, the Jets were the Jets and are the Jets, and because of Items 1 and 2, they shall always be the Jets. A benching or a firing or another firing or some future firing will not and cannot change that. The only thing for Jets employees to do at this point is to become ex-employees as quickly as possible. I mean, who on that payroll has got it better than Smilin' Bobby Saleh right now?
This new information, namely that it's Woody's fault even more than it's Aaron's fault, raises an obvious question. With What's His Face having won election to become the night janitor on the hell train again, what ambassadorship might he give a faithful donor like Woody this time? Johnson did four years in Great Britain as the U.S. ambassador there during Pumpkinhead's first term, during which time the Brits signed up for the economic coffin that is Brexit. With all due respect to whatever it is Woody does on behalf of America's preeminent pharmacy shelf-stacker and his family business, Johnson & Johnson, and even bearing in mind England’s devastating and self-inflicted gut wound during his time as America’s emissary, ambassador might seem like a job that suits Johnson better than owning a football team. Or, anyway, at least like one that would keep him away from the team facility much of the time.
The problem with that theory is that the four years he was watching Boris Johnson (no relation, though they probably should be) slit England's throat were four of the worst years in Jets history. Before Johnson bought the team in 2000, they had the 26th-best (out of 32) winning percentage. In the first 17 years that Woody owned the factory, they rose slowly to 17th, and even made the playoffs six times. Then Johnson skived off to England and the team bottomed out, tying for the worst record in the sport with the New York Giants. But when he returned—asterisk here: his brother Chris was in charge for those 18 wins and 46 defeats, and Woody may have been making regular phone calls back to the states to mind the Todd Bowles and Adam Gase administrations—his magic was gone. The Jets are 21-41 since then, which is 30th, and have felt every bit that bad.
But we are straying away from the core of today's thesis, which is to find a country to which Woody Johnson can serve as ambassador, so that he can only be blamed for some random international incident rather than the ongoing deterioration of the state’s 23rd-best football program.
All ambassadorships are subject to change with a new administration, and let's not forget the possibility that Anybody But Him might just close all the embassies as part of his worldview, or because he is having a bad day and wanted to feel something that didn't feel quite as much as burning down hospitals. But if we believe there is some urgency in this appointment, there are 14 countries that do not currently have an ambassador or a nominee for same. According to the American Foreign Service Association, those include Afghanistan, Belarus, Bolivia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Finland, Germany, Slovenia, Spain and Andorra, Sudan, Tonga, Turkiye, the Vatican, and Venezuela. After that, the choice of country hinges on two questions—what level of country does $3 million in career campaign contributions buy a fella, and how far away does the average Jets fan want Woody to be? Now that he's making Tyrod Taylor suggestions, is Tonga really far enough away?
Like so many other items in the new administration's graft distribution plan, this is largely an exercise in depression. Woody getting a new overseas gig guarantees nothing, Jets-wise. Frankly, brief bursts of competence strewn within this 65-year-long Ingmar Bergman movie of a franchise suggests that Jetsery is actually a hereditary condition, one passed from each generation of nincompoops to their meatheaded successors, and that Woody is not actually the cause but merely an exhausted septuagenarian who knows he isn't good at delegating power or hiring underlings and so has decided to take the job on himself. After all, who knows more about chafing than someone who sells baby powder?
But just in case, here's the national anthem of the Bahamas, in case Trump thinks of Woody as his own version of King Edward VIII, the largely disgraced former King of England who was banished to the Caribbean to keep him away from collaborating with the Nazis during World War II. After all, what's the difference between abdicating your throne in shame and micromanaging the New York Jets? We'll wait for your responses the cesspool below.
Correction (3:37 p.m. ET): This blog originally misidentified King Edward VIII as King George VIII.
