HEAD SHOULD BOWLES
The time has come for Jets to cut ties with failed leader
THESE are the kinds of games that get head coaches fired, with cause, without an ounce of regret. That has to be crossing Woody Johnson’s mind this morning. If it isn’t, it should be. And if Todd Bowles isn’t worried, he should be.
“I coached for my job the first day I took this job,” Bowles said in the middle of a postgame speech, in which he seethed throughout and no fewer than two dozen times described his team’s latest effort with a variation of this: “We got our ass kicked.”
It isn’t just that the Jets were smeared by the Colts on Monday night, 41-10. It wasn’t just that the guys wearing green jerseys disgraced themselves up and down this 60-minute slog, looking so disinterested you almost wanted politely to ask the crowd to quiet its booing because it seemed to be giving the poor players headaches.
“We didn’t have a lot of effort,” Bowles said, about as damning a summary as a coach can ever attach to his team — or himself.
Yes, coaches get fired for games like this, and Bowles ought to get fired for a game like this because this was the inevitable culmination of what we already have seen from these Jets: shamefully porous defense and shockingly inept offense. Sprinkle in a no-show ef- fort? It’s a sadly easy call.
Ryan Fitzpatrick may have taken his last snap as a Jets quarterback, and Bryce Petty replaced him and will play the season’s final four games. But let’s be very frank here: Neither man looks remotely capable of the task right now.
Harsh? Maybe. But this was a harsh night. This was a harsh game. This has been a harsh season, and there must be harsh consequences. Bowles was sold to us as a man’s man, a player’s coach, a fierce disciplinarian whose teams might not win every week but certainly would give an honest effort every week.
Instead, they mail these games in now, week after week, postage due. That’s on them, sure. Pride still ought to matter. But you’d better believe it’s on the coach, too.
“All of it falls on me,” Bowles said. “I’m the head coach.”
And he has to answer for it. There was talk he was afraid of losing his locker room if he benched Fitzpatrick, and that looks like a laughably minor worry since it so clearly is a locker room stuffed with losers. A coach ought to want to shed a burden such as that.
This would have been bad enough if it had been hidden amid a pile of 1 o’clock Sunday games, without anyone of note in attendance, maybe without broadcasters, the way the networks treated another meaningless Jets game back in the day. That’s the fate bad teams deserve: play out the string, don’t get hurt, don’t get in anyone’s way. Like America’s. But, then, that’s why these Jets are a special kind of calamity, a unique brand of Dumpster fire. Because what may well have
been rock bottom for this team in the 20 years AK (After Kotite) was destined to be played under lights, in front of national TV cameras, before 40,000 empty seats and two notably occupied ones: one belonging to Vice President-elect Mike Pence, one belonging to Woody Johnson.
(Now, the fact Pence is the governor of Indiana actually might have made this all work out for Woody in a Costanzado-everything-opposite kind of way, since his hometown Colts were the beneficiaries of this prime-time pummeling ...)
But that’s probably not what Johnson had in mind, and so you have to wonder, after watching up-close this football fiefdom Johnson has spent close to two decades assembling, if Pence didn’t go back to the boss and suggest a slightly lower- profile embassy assignment. Bayonne, perhaps. Johnson should go to his football people and demand a similar exile for Bowles. Petty has yet to show he belongs anywhere close to an NFL huddle — and GM Mike Maccagnan is the one who has to answer for
that — but at least he delivered the night’s lone bright spot — a fourth-quarter touchdown bomb to Robby Anderson.
That was all. That was it. The rest? Well, Bowles summed it up well: “You know your job is in jeopardy when you take one of these jobs.” And that’s before you get a game like this on your record, the kind of game that gets a coach fired. Hey, it’s like Bowles himself said: All of it falls on him. He’s the head coach.
At least for now.