James L. Dolan had a good long run wearing the belt as the worst owner in New York sports, often in two sports, no small feat. Then Dolan shared it with Woody Johnson for a few years, right after the Jets actually made a couple of AFC championship games on Ambassador Woody’s watch and before Dolan hired Leon Rose and Rose hired Tom Thibodeau and the two of them brought the Knicks back.
But now Woody Johnson has the belt all to himself. He is not just the worst and weakest owner in town, with a football team as bad right now as it’s ever been. He is one of the worst in New York sports history.
Woody proved it again this week, when he didn’t know enough to shut up about his quarterback when he was clumsily trying to praise his coach. The coach, Aaron Glenn, was brought in to change the culture around the Jets. He sure was. We’ve heard so much about that culture change it should be the trigger for a drinking game: Glenn is changing the culture, everybody drink. But Glenn has a better chance of becoming an astronaut than doing that.
You can’t change the culture around the Jets because the culture is an owner who only helped the team because he was able to buy himself a job as Ambassador to the Court of St. James in England. Even that eventually turned out badly for Jets fans. By last season, Woody was fully back in charge when the Jets went back to London to play the Vikings. They had a chance to win that one, when Aaron Rodgers was still their quarterback. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but they blew it in the fourth quarter.
Woody must have thought that made him look bad in front of his former and fancy English friends. So he came back to America and fired his coach, Robert Saleh, who had a 2-3 record at the time. This was the same Saleh who had managed to win seven games the year before after Rodgers got hurt with Zach Wilson and Trevor Siemian as his quarterbacks.
Now the Jets of Ambassador Woody are about to play their 20th game since Saleh’s firing. They have won three of those games. Since Johnson has owned the team (2000), the Jets now have the 28th worst record in the league, out of 32 teams. Over the last eight seasons, they have had the worst record in the league. He’s not the only second-generation owner we have around here, of course. Just the worst. Put it another way: Woody is no good and can prove it.
As he was throwing his quarterback Justin Fields under the team bus the other day, Johnson mentioned that Glenn was “turning around parts of it.”
You wanted to ask him which parts, but there was no point, you get the idea that even the simplest football question remains a brain buster for him.
Here’s a number very much worth considering as a way of understanding where the Jets are right now, whether or not they upset Joe Flacco — another members of the Jets’ Alumni Association for quarterbacks — and the Bengals on Sunday or not:
The number is 68-135.
Do you know what that is? That’s the team’s record since Woody fired Mike Tannenbaum a couple of years after those two AFC championship games under Tannenbaum and Rex Ryan. The Jets went 6-10 and Woody got impatient again, and Tannenbaum was gone. Since then, his team has a sparkling .335 winning percentage. That means the Jets have lost two of every three games they’ve played since the 2012 season, all the way through that dreary and unwatchable loss at home to the Panthers last Sunday.
You better believe the Jets survived the first 10 years of Woody’s ownership, managing to hang on with what Bill Parcells left them before Tannenbaum and Rex made it work even with Mark Sanchez at quarterback. Survived and occasionally flourished. The Jets won more games than they lost in that first decade of Johnson’s ownership, made six playoff appearances, had four 10-plus-win seasons. For most of those years, Woody was smart enough to keep his mouth shut and stay out of the way.
But then Woody Johnson couldn’t help himself any longer. He fired Tannenbaum and kept Ryan as his coach, and replaced Tannenbaum with John Idzik. When you look at Idzik’s record as Jets general manager, you think now that destiny brought him and Woody together. Really, what could possibly have gone wrong with a GM who had no say about who his head coach was? You know what? Almost everything went wrong. You know why? Because they were Woody Johnson’s Jets, that’s why. Before long Idzik and Rex were both gone.
Now, after 68-135 since that 2012 season, Woody has decided that this is all Justin Field’s fault. Fields: The quarterback who has been around for just the last six of those 135 losses since Woody banged Tannenbaum. No wonder Aaron Rodgers got it into his head that some of the Jets’ personnel decisions were being influenced by ratings one of Woody’s sons was seeing on the “Madden NFL” video game.
No wonder Rodgers joked about being “fired by a teenager.” No wonder we’re seeing Johnson family money on the donor list for that East Wing teardown of the White House. Because, let’s face it, who knows more about teardowns than the owners of the New York Jets? Maybe looking back it’s no shocker that Bill Belichick ran for the closest door after just one day as HC of the NYJ, just as Woody was just coming through another door after buying the team.
“It’s hard when you’ve got a quarterback with the rating [Fields has] got,” Johnson said the other day.
He didn’t say he was referring to a video-game rating, but who knows.
Then Johnson added this: “If we can just complete a pass, it would look good.”
This is an owner so insecure that he got himself sideways over Rodgers paying for food trucks to come to the Jets practice facility, especially after the Jets would lose another game. He felt that Rodgers was showing him up by spending his own money for the trucks, money that would have been tipping money for the owner of the team. As always, the owner obsesses about so many things — starting with the media — that have hardly anything to do with getting his team a victory or two.
There isn’t a Jets fan I know who’s been happy watching Justin Fields try to complete passes this season. But with everything else going on, with how poorly the team has been coached and how many penalties it’s committed, to put this all on his quarterback — one who apparently signed himself — Johnson looked smaller and meaner than ever.
Woody Johnson started out his conversation with the media that day by saying “I don’t have any comments.”
At least the guy was right about something.
SPORTS SOLD THEIR SOUL TO GAMBLING, GIANTS AIM TO LAND ANOTHER PUNCH & MORE GAMES FROM KNICKS …
Who did the Blue Jays think they were facing in Game 1 — the Yankees?
Too soon?
I really was surprised the other day when the story of the gambling arrests in the NBA broke that none of those reporting the news on television were giving us odds on whether Chauncey Billups and Terry Rozier might beat the rap.
Listen up:
If Rozier or any coach or player thinks they can get away with side hustles and not get caught by all the algorithms in place, then they must have rocks in their heads.
Or decimal points.
So, there’s that.
But there’s also this, for the NBA and all the other sports leagues who have sold their souls to these legal betting sites:
They’re not allowed to be shocked, in the immortal words of Capt. Renault in “Casablanca,” that there is gambling going on in here.
And maybe all the celebrities pitching for all these sports gambling sites on TV — and incessantly — ought to think about saving their hand-wringing on this one.
Just throwing that out there.
We’re going to find out a lot about the Giants in Philadelphia this Sunday.
Like, a whole lot.
We’re going to find out if that upset victory over the Eagles a couple of weeks ago was more than just a lucky punch that connected.
And, staying with the boxing analogy for the moment, we’re going to find out if the Giants can take a punch after what happened to them last Sunday in Denver.
I sometimes think there’s a better chance of me playing a full NBA schedule than Mitchell Robinson.
By the way?
Every time you start to think that things are really different in the Knicks’ front office, the Knicks start playing games with Robinson’s injury status.
The more things change …
You do the rest.
Browns at Jets next Sunday should be a pretty festive football occasion, right?
The Koch family now has a piece of the Giants, and I’m wondering how long before they look to get their hooks into the Yankees.
This is the part of the sports year when I feel as if old Smoltzie has moved in with me.
“The Proving Ground,” the great Michael Connelly’s latest Mickey Haller novel, is a master class.
And staying with the lit’ry life, “The Picasso Heist” — by my pal James Patterson and Howard Roughan — is a blast.
Billy Crudup is as great as ever in “The Morning Show.”
The Yankees could use a grinder like Ernie Clement.
Break up the Knicks.
Adam Silver says he is “deeply disturbed” by these gambling indictments.
Well yeah, same, Commish.
