It is a beloved media tradition: When a dysfunctional team's dysfunctional season reaches its dysfunctional end, reporters covering that team are permitted to write one big notebook-dumping explainer/eulogy. With a few outré exceptions, no one cares enough about bad teams to justify two such stories; with a few outré exceptions, no team is quite dysfunctional enough to fill out more than one. If you are a Tennessee Titans fan, to take one example, this is more or less the one big thing you have left to look forward to this season. You already know the team is lousy, inert, soggy and sodden and miserable; in a few weeks, once everyone goes home, you will find out whether that has anything to do with Tony Pollard's insistence upon letting his pet puma wander around the locker room or some such thing. That is how it usually works.
But the New York Jets are different. Everyone always and already knows about the pumas wandering around the locker room. Every week their ulcerous and increasingly haggard quarterback joins Pat McAfee's ESPN show via Zoom, seemingly from the Black Lodge, and starts Speaking Real Words about the germ theory of disease or whatever else is troubling him. This week, Aaron Rodgers testily demanded that critics of his (terrible!) recent play disclose their vaccination status, either as an indication of their bias or just as proof that they lack the courage that permitted Rodgers to self-immunize against infectious disease, possibly by eating hundreds of small, smooth rocks. This is just how the Jets are, and more or less how they have been since the pharmaceutical heir Woody Johnson bought the team 25 years ago. That they have the longest streak in American pro sports without a playoff appearance is not surprising given all that, but also feels somehow incidental to the organization's broader project, which under Johnson's blithely buttheaded stewardship has mostly been to generate news about people getting fired.
All of which is to say that the Jets are very much the sort of team, and absolutely having the sort of season, that would justify that triple-bylined notebook-dumping autopsy arriving with three weeks left in the regular season. That story, by The Athletic's Zack Rosenblatt, Dianna Russini, and Michael Silver, focuses on Johnson's willful, liberated, frequently avant-garde work as a team owner. There is the faint whiff of the Mar-a-Lago buffet about a lot of Johnson's behavior, which more than 20 sources paint as relentlessly arbitrary, pissy, and high-handed. Johnson, who was Donald Trump's ambassador to the U.K. during his first term but will not be during his second, requests that team employees address him as Mr. Ambassador. Nobody seems to like this very much; Johnson either doesn't care or hasn't noticed.
And so the owner struts and blunders around the team facility doing exactly the sort of weird stuff that a septuagenarian rich kid would do after decades of boundaryless, responsibility-averse, consequence-free life. "With Woody, it’s like, 'I’m right—prove me wrong,'" a current Jets exec told The Athletic. "You just don’t know what to expect … He’s been right enough, just with his random opinions, that (a bad decision) doesn’t dissuade him. And when he’s wrong, who’s gonna hold him accountable?" When a team spokesperson counters this by saying that Johnson "is like most team owners," he's probably not wrong in the broader sense. But in another, more specific sense, Johnson is, as a former Jets coach once said, what his record says he is.
More interesting is the extent to which Johnson has brought his teenage sons, Brick and Jack, into the family business. "When we’re discussing things," one team exec said, "you’ll hear Woody cite something that Brick or Jack read online that’s being weighed equally against whatever opinion someone else in the department has." In some instances, this has led to Johnson second-guessing front-office decisions due to players' Madden ratings or tweets. The Jets spokesperson, who reliably delivers the biggest laughs in this story, countered that the teens' input was "used as a reference point; it is not determinative." Johnson and his wife and their teen sons are described as generally just kind of sucking around the locker room, being weird in all the ways a person might if they had never been told to knock it off.
In the postgame locker room after last year’s Week 17 loss to the Cleveland Browns, multiple players said they heard Johnson’s sons loudly disparaging certain Jets players.
This year, on Halloween night, the Jets registered their first victory since Saleh’s firing four weeks earlier. It was a significant moment for a struggling team. Rodgers walked into an energized locker room with a game ball in hand, and it was expected that he’d give the ball to Ulbrich, a customary gesture when a coach gets his first NFL win.
But before Rodgers could speak, Brick Johnson took another game ball and awarded it to wide receiver Garrett Wilson in a profanity-laced exclamation, which the owner’s son later posted to Instagram. Woody Johnson then gave Ulbrich the ball Rodgers had been holding. Multiple players said the energy felt drained out of the room.
Every NFL player, to some extent, works in conditions like these—subject to the whims of some awful rich guy and his family, and within the variously curdled cultures that such people tend to create. It may be inevitable that the extent to which Johnson seems like an outlier even in this miserable cohort—a tick or two more grating and arbitrary than the other wet-eyed legacy princelings and private equity brigands and defective gentry in the NFL's ownership caste, and more tragically hands-on—parallels the extent to which the Jets are themselves reliably weirder and worse than other NFL teams. The team's perpetually sour, thwarted, ultra-stunted state certainly seems easier to understand when considering the ways in which the owner is the same way.
But also it is important to keep another possibility in mind. Where one reader might see it as inappropriate for Johnson to let a teenage boy named Brick bum-rush or shit-talk his employees, others might see it as a father instilling his family's passion for being high-handed and strange in the next generation, or just as a touching bit of outreach from an elder rich kid to a young and impressionable member of the Let's Go community. Some will see Johnson as meddlesome and nasty, while others might agree with the Jets spokesman that Johnson "really just seeks out and welcomes feedback and debate." The Jets might look, from the outside and in this story, like an organization buckling under the weight of one tragicomic case of ultra-rich arrested development; others might see them as a family business. The spokesperson, who is admittedly not an unbiased party, rejects that first premise out of hand. "We wouldn’t have been named one of the best places to work in New Jersey if people thought that way," the spokesperson noted. "There's never been a complaint."
