You better get it right, Mike
BY now, we all know the 2017 Jets season has very little to do with 2017. This is going to be about 2018, 2019 and beyond. It is going to be about figuring out who is a keeper, who should be kicked to the curb and resetting a franchise that has lost its way over the past six seasons.
The spotlight is on third-year general manager Mike Maccagnan. The plan this offseason was to move on from aging, overpriced veterans and focus on going young. Deciding to go that route and dumping the veterans was the easy part. Now comes the trickier half of the plan: finding and developing the young talent to build this team around.
“All of our focus is to ideally build this thing through the draft,” Maccagnan said recently, a line he has repeated many times.
That is the hope of the other 31 teams in the NFL, too. What makes it difficult is the actual drafting of players. Jets fans know this all too well, after watching years of bad drafts ultimately cause the foundation of their team to rot. There is no one left on this team from the 2012 draft. Guard Brian Winters was the only player from the 2013 class to get a second contract, and the Idzik 12 of 2014 is down to four, and that number should be lower by September.
This is why Maccagnan was hired. Unlike his predecessors Mike Tannenbaum and John Idzik, Maccagnan was not a salary-cap expert. He was not hired because he was a great negotiator. Maccagnan is a scout. His mentor, Charley Casserly, recommended him to Jets owner Woody Johnson not because he could balance a spreadsheet, but because he could find the players to get the Jets back to the playoffs.
Through two drafts, the jury still is out on Maccagnan. Leonard Williams is a long-term star, but every other player he has taken re- mains a question mark — none bigger than 2016 second-round quarterback Christian Hackenberg. We’re going to get answers on many of those question marks this year as the second- and thirdyear players take on bigger roles.
“We have some young players. We’re excited to see how they do going forward,” Maccagnan said last month. “A lot of times, players make their biggest progress — in terms of their skill level, in terms of their development — in the first two to three seasons, and we had a lot of players, unfortunately due to injury, get a lot of exposure last year. But I think they’ll be better off for it and hopefully help us going forward.”
Maccagnan also needs to land some immediate starters in this draft. The Jets have four selections in the top 107 picks. Maccagnan needs to find three starters in those four picks. There can be no “projects” taken or talk of “redshirt years” this time around.
That brings us to quarterback. By all accounts, the quarterbacks in this draft all come with risk. With the Jets selecting at No. 6, that could be enough to scare them off. If the Jets disagree and feel like Mitchell Trubisky or Deshaun Watson or someone else is a can’t-miss talent, then they should take him. But if there is any thought of taking a quarterback who might be good in two or three years, Maccagnan, who already has drafted two quarterbacks, does not have the luxury of taking a player like that in the first round. If he does, he could be drafting him for the next general manager.
The 2017 Jets season won’t be judged by wins and losses. It will be judged by hope. When the season ends, is there hope for the future? Yankees fans are accepting a team with less firepower than they are accustomed to because they have hope with young stars Gary Sanchez, Aaron Judge and Greg Bird. Mets fans endured some lean years earlier this decade because young arms like Matt Harvey, Noah Syndergaard and Zack Wheeler provided hope.
Right now, it is hard to find hope on the Jets’ roster. It is Maccagnan’s job to get some.