John

Idzik

Idzik was under siege from the moment he arrived in New York, but set the stage for this year’s big offseason by fixing the Jets’ salary cap following the Mike Tannenbaum era. “He’ll do a little bit of everything,” GM David Caldwell said of Idzik. “He’s a great cultural fit for us. He has a great understanding of the salary cap and the different ways to do a contract.”

"[Rex is] an excellent coach, excellent teacher. The fans are going to want to see something different. They’re not going to let us get along and I don’t want to do exactly the same thing. So it’s going to be either the way we coach or the way we approach it. It could be with the same people. It might be with different people,” said Johnson. That sounds like an owner who would again prefer to retain Ryan and find a new GM. But that just doesn’t work in the NFL. We’d guess both Idzik and Ryan get canned. Idzik has bungled both free agency and the draft.

This was fully expected, especially after the Jets’ own website published stories this week on Idzik’s failings as a general manager. Per Mort, owner Woody Johnson will leave Rex Ryan’s fate in the hands of the Jets’ next GM. Johnson would love to keep Rex -- he’s a top-ten NFL head coach -- but New York’s next decision maker may deem it best to clean house. Rex cleaned out his office this week, but “he has not been told he is out.”

It’s becoming clearer that owner Woody Johnson is ready to clean house from the top down. Idzik may not have gotten a fair shake -- being forced to retain coach Rex Ryan -- but he also didn’t do himself any favors by blundering the 2014 draft and the cornerback and quarterback positions. At the link below, Cimini provides a comprehensive list of the top GM candidates this offseason.

Hired in January of 2013 to bring Seattle’s brand of roster building to the Jets, Idzik instead failed miserably. He bungled the Darrelle Revis situation, left Rex Ryan with street-level talent in the secondary, drafted Geno Smith and moved at a glacial pace in free agency decisions. Idzik reportedly rubbed multiple people in the Jets front office the wrong way, creating “division” in the organization. Owner Woody Johnson is cleaning house and starting over by firing both Idzik and Rex Ryan at the same time.