AP

And so Jets offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer has resigned. Yes, he has resigned.

More accurately, he has “resigned.”

Per a league source, Schottenheimer resigned after being told by the Jets to get another job, or get out. With the Jaguars’ head-coaching job going to Mike Mularkey and no other team interested in Schottenheimer as a head-coaching candidate, it was time to go.

The Jets owed Schottenheimer more than $3 million over the next two years, and it’s unlikely that he’d walk away from that money. The source says the Jets created the impression that Schottenheimer would be back and otherwise talked him up in the hopes that he’d be hired elsewhere — and that the Jets would be off the hook for the buyout.

The only problem is that, even if the Jets admit that they were creating a ruse, they’ve created yet another credibility problem for themselves.

And that’s the kind of thing that could cost the team a lot more than $3 million over the long haul.