It’s hard to be the king, especially when it comes to earning the title of the worst owner in football. There’s plenty of “competition,” with at least a half-dozen other owners constantly making awful moves that defy both logic and common sense.
But Woody Johnson has done some serious work to retake the crown, so let’s give him some credit. After the brief ray of hope that was the Aaron Rodgers trade, he’s turned the Jets back into a joke. Johnson has retaken the throne from David Tepper of Carolina, who’s having a strangely quiet season that also defies logic given how bad the Panthers have been.
Hitting new lows with the Jets is H-A-R-D
Every column or article about the Jets is expected to come with a thorough review of the franchise’s lows, but we’ll skip those, other than the obligatory mention of the Butt Fumble. What’s impressive about what Johnson has done is the degree of difficulty given how bad the Jets have been, to the point where you almost have to try to exceed the previous gaffes.
But Johnson has done it. For some reason he decided to ignore Aaron Rodgers’ history in Green Bay, which was a fiasco. There were plenty of signs that Rodgers unique talent was fading, but Woody decided to ignore those as well. Most egregiously, he paid no attention to the efforts Rodgers made to take control of the NFL franchise, not to mention the hoops that Packers had to jump through to diminish his influence and get him out of town.
It was the perfect marriage of incompetence and elitism, and it led to the firing of GM Joe Douglas this week. Johnson bought into the idea that a simple change of scenery would change who Rodgers was, and once he had Rodgers in the building, the Jets owner made an even worse mistake. He let Rodgers bring in more of his friends, many of whom could no longer play or coach football.
The Jets are champs when it comes to leaking inside information
Given the results on the field, it’s hard to imagine how Woody Johnson could have made this worse. But he found a way, thanks to the awful culture that permeates the New York Jets as an organization.
What the Jets do better than any other team in football is leak inside information that’s supposed to stay inside the building. This trait dates back decades, and once again it surfaced at the worst possible time when we learned this week that Johnson actually suggested benching his quarterback early in the year when things began to go south.
We’re still waiting for the other shoe to drop. The Jets are on a bye this week, which means Aaron Rodgers was able to avoid any kind of media availability, and he passed on his usual turn with Pat McAfee, which is usually where the quarterback offers up some kind of word-salad defense for whatever crisis is at hand.
This won’t last, of course. No one who knows Rodgers expects him to not make some kind of comment, and based on his history we know it will likely be a weird combination of passive aggressive and inflammatory. That’s who Aaron Rodgers is, and at this point it would be ridiculous to expect him to change. He’s an expert at making bad situations worse, and that's what he'll do here.
Johnson’s bad NFL owner competitors won’t stay silent
This year has been a banner year for bad owners doing foolish things, so it’s fair to speculate about who will make a move to vie for the crown. Jerry Jones is the most obvious possibility given how awful the Cowboys are at this point, but there’s one name that stands out the most.
What will David Tepper do? He’s been strangely silent this year given how much Bryce Young has struggled, and Dave Canales has proven to be anything but the QB whisperer that was part of his reputation.
The Panthers have actually managed to win a few games, but it’s absurd to assume that Mt. Tepper won’t go off again some time during the next six weeks, and he’ll have his work cut out for him if he wants to outdo the sheer ridiculousness of the situation Woody Johnson has created in New York.