Right now I’m entering this debate with a stack of spades in my arsenal and there’s no need for me to save the biggest trump card of them all ( the ace of spades for the uninitiated) for the end. I’ll wait until that first spade is thrown (which would be the fact that people are actually calling for Idzik’s job) and throw the biggest trump card right off the bat and leave you scrambling never to recover.

Firing a general manager two years into his reign would be textbook incompetence. Fire a general manager two years into his reign and all you’re going to do is hit the reset button and start all over again only to find yourself in the same spot next year. Fire a general manager two years into his reign and what serious candidate could you possibly hope to get to replace him?

What general manager candidate is going to want a job where they could be fired before they have a chance to pick their own coach and properly build a team just because the fans are whining like little petulant little children and the media says he must go?

The fire Idzik crowd claims he’s just a numbers guy, he has no real football background. So fire the guy with “no football background” because of a bunch of people with no football background say so? Yeah, that’s some mighty sound logic.

Idzik took over a complete mess of a team. A team whose cap was maxed out, had numerous overpriced veterans on the payroll, a quarterback who everyone wanted run out of town and a mandate to trade the team’s best player. And you want him fired two years into his job?

If you want to judge Idzik on the success of this season alone then yes it would be a failure. But to do so is the equivalent of grading someone on a test when they have only completed 30 percent of the test.

I’ve said this before, I’ve written this before but I’ll write it again, this team was built to tread water this year and compete in the next year or two. This was a rebuilding year and just because you don’t want to suffer through a rebuilding year or Idzik refuses admit that’s what it is (foolishly I admit) doesn’t mean it’s not a rebuilding year.

What free-agents could Idzik have signed that would have made this team a playoff team? Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie? Emmanuel Sanders? Sure Idzik could have overpaid for a handful of these guys but you know all that would have done? It would have made this a six or eight win team, at best, with no cap flexibility to improve in the future.

The Jets would have been stuck with bad contracts to overpaid players and doomed to be mediocre. In other words they’d be no different than when Mike Tannenbaum was here, the same general manager Jets fans were happy to see get fired not even two years ago.

Fans complained about celebrating mediocrity last year because they exceeded expectations and were happy to retain their coach, yet they want to continue the same path that has never led to anywhere other than mediocrity. Idzik was hired to ignore the noise and stick to his plan of long-term success, he’s following the same blueprint every other successful franchise follows, the Packers, Steelers, Patriots, 49ers, Seahawks etc. etc.

Maybe the plan works, maybe it doesn’t but it’s the right plan. He just has to execute. Just because a certain play-call doesn’t work doesn’t mean it wasn’t the right call. You need the right call and proper execution, Idzik has dialed up the right play-call now he just needs to execute.

If you want to question his ability to execute, fine. But he needs the time to be able to execute and guess what? He’s going to get it.

Start all the websites and Twitter handles you want, he is not getting fired two years in and if he did it would be further proof that Woody Johnson was the inept one and this team would be destined for sustained long-term failure.

You want the football world to stop calling your team a circus and a disaster? Hope they don’t fire the general manager two years into his contract because that would certainly bring in the clown cars.

Fire a general manager two years into his reign and you’ll have the same decision-makers hiring the new general manager, imagine how fast the fans will turn on the new guy. He’d be lucky to make it through his first preseason before hearing calls for his head.

Monday’s press conference was horrible, I still have no idea what Idzik was trying to convince anyone of. But he doesn’t get paid to have good press conferences. If a press conference has any impact on whether you believe a general manager should keep his job you simply aren’t qualified to even discuss whether or not a general manager should keep his job.

I’m not promising Idzik’s plan will ultimately succeed, in two or three years I may even be writing he should be fired, but he needs to be given a chance to see his plan through. He, and all general managers, needs more than two years to determine if he has failed.

There is no hope in a franchise without direction. Fire a general manager two years into his reign and this franchise will forever flounder in failure.





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See what Jets fans are saying here

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