When owner Woody Johnson held a press conference following the ousters of coach Rex Ryan and General Manager John Idzik, he talked about the need for a strong connection between the next people to fill those positions.
Johnson admitted “in retrospect” that the Ryan-Idzik partnership may have been doomed to fail when Idzik wasn’t allowed to determine if Ryan should stay on the job in 2013. To remedy that, Johnson said that the preferred plan this time was to hire a general manager who would then be involved in the process of hiring a head coach.
Either Charley Casserly liked what Johnson had to say or he earned some of his consulting money by sharing that philosophy with the Jets owner because Casserly gave the same answer as Johnson during an interview on WDAE in Tampa on Wednesday.
“In a perfect world,” Casserly said, via the New York Daily News. “You hire the G.M. first and then hire the head coach, because it’s critical that you have a good working relationship between the two of them. And that’s the best way to get it. However, sometimes opportunities present themselves on a coach that you can get in competition with and you feel like you need to pull the trigger on the coach first. And then come back and hire a general manager. And where the head coach has input into it. But you pick the general manager and try to find the best marriage. Now people will say, ‘Well, that can’t work.’ Well, Seattle won the Super Bowl and that’s exactly what they did.”
The Jets have interviewed six head coaching candidates so Casserly would probably have a good idea if anyone had knocked their socks off to the point that they’d upset the cart to hire a coach first. It doesn’t look like that’s the case, but history says just about anything’s possible in a NFL coaching search and with the Jets.