New York Jets

Michigan Lands $5 Million Dollar Michigan Man

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The figures are in and Michigan Man, Jim Harbaugh, has signed a seven-year, $35 million dollar contract with a $2 million dollar signing bonus. The deal also includes a provision where Harbaugh will be eligible for a 10 percent raise after the third and fifth year of his contract.

Harbaugh will not be the highest paid coach in college football, and that is better optically for the university and its coach, but Harbaugh won’t be shopping the clearance rack at Walmart for his khakis.

Watching the press conference today, there was a rising tide of good feeling and bonhomie associated with the selection of Harbaugh, but the cold, hard reality of Michigan football will eventually rear its ugly head.

This is not a school that hired Jim Harbaugh to win the Big Ten’s East Division, but a big time football program desperately in need of validation through a Big Ten championship and a national title. (This isn’t We Are Marshall.) Somehow, I don’t get the feeling the folks in the SEC are too worried about the resurrection of Michigan when Nick Saban’s Crimson Tide reloads year after year.

With Harbaugh at the helm, Michigan’s alums and fans expect to win a national championship, but are these people in touch with reality and the present landscape of college football? Harbaugh will need to challenge the power of the SEC, compete for elite recruits and make Michigan a destination for future pros. What high school quarterback, with NFL aspirations, wouldn’t want to be mentored by Harbaugh? Will that be enough for Harbaugh’s program to beat the SEC and Ohio St. for recruits that can make Michigan a perennial powerhouse? Michigan football is an unwieldy beast that has a voracious appetite for success, and this beast will not hesitate to devour a struggling Michigan man.

Want To Be an NFL Owner?

At the New York Jets press conference announcing the firings of General Manager John Idzik and Head Coach Rex Ryan, owner Woody Johnson started speaking extemporaneously about former Jet, current Patriot, and All World cornerback, Darelle Revis, who will be a free agent.

Johnson committed a blatant act of tampering, but what surprises me is the sheer stupidity of most NFL owners. Woody Johnson  has proven to be at the top of that class. Purchasing the Jets for $635 million in January of 2000, Woody Johnson has proven himself to be a poor communicator and an inept manager of a professional sports franchise, but his net worth makes him a Teflon Don that has a boot on the neck of Jets fans for years to come.

A person who lacks charisma and leadership skills will be tasked with hiring the next coach of the New York Jets. Johnson has hired Charlie Casserly and Ron Wolf as old school NFL consiglieres to assist him, but Woody Johnson will have the ultimate say as to whom replaces Rex Ryan.

If Woody Johnson wasn’t an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, would he ever amass wealth in today’s world?

In the United States, there are perhaps a few hundred people who can purchase an NFL team. I am not one of those people, but I am supremely confident that I could run the New York Jets more efficiently than Woody Johnson and the Atlanta Falcons better than Arthur T. Blank. After dismissing Mike Smith as head coach, the Falcons have decided to go in a different direction and bring in edgier players. How soon we forget Mike Vick’s dogfighting scandal, Bobby Petrino walking out on the team, and the culture of chronic dysfunction that plagued Arthur T. Blank’s Dirty Birds before Mike Smith took over the sideline.

The most successful NFL franchises are owned by men who can identify the right front office talent, hold employees accountable, and get the fuck out of the way when they have no fucking clue what they are doing.

The Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder and the Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam are perfect examples of egocentric jag-offs who refuse to get the hell out of the way.

With his ubiquitous Jets hat, Woody Johnson has the air of a prep school dilettante who has found a club sport to occupy his time. The Jets give Woody street cred at the country club, but he lacks the ability to make difficult decisions. Woody rakes in the bucks for the RNC, but the Jets chose to stay under the salary cap for the 2014 season.

Rex Ryan should have been fired when John Idzik was named general manager two years ago. Idzik did not want Rexy as his coach, Rexy did not want Geno Smith as his quarterback, and Woody didn’t know what the hell he was doing. The Jets have a weak owner, and weak owners are routinely punished in the NFL, which should be in line with Woody’s political views.

Mike Grimm

Staten Island Congressman Michael Grimm (R) is looking for a job, and he’d bring some Staten Island win or I’ll toss you off the third deck leadership to Met Life Stadium.

Rex

I would hire Rex Ryan to lead my team when he learns clock management, his sideline doesn’t constantly appear like a NASCAR pit crew on Adderall, and he takes an interest in grooming a quarterback.

I would hire Rex to make a socially acceptable sex tape, but he might refrain from making a sexually explicit fetish video as it could be potentially career damaging.

NFL Blues

The NFL bores me. The NFL is a chameleon that will alter its product for the greatest Return On Investment. Fantasy leagues explode and the NFL quickly shifts to a league that loves the pass and hates the run. Tackling is treated as a necessary evil, but we sure don’t want to alienate our viewers with images of players leaving the field unable to remember their own names, the name of their wife sitting in the Family Section, or the name of their girlfriend in Section 202.

Prep Schools

Woody Johnson gives prep schools a bad name.

Why Belichick and Brady Will Not Win the Super Bowl

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There is nothing more irritating than hearing from the Boston media and Masshole Nation that the New England Patriots are going to win Super Bowl XLIX in Glendale, Arizona. Let’s not let history prevent the ‘In Bill We Trust’ sycophants to believe in anything else, Belichick’s Patriots are nearly a virtual lock to be victorious in the final game of another arduous NFL season.

Though this would contradict history, there are very few folks in New England, who can envision a scenario, where the dynamic duo of Bill Belichick and Tom Brady do not capture their fourth Super Bowl. No coach in NFL history has ever gone ten years between Super Bowl wins, and that is the feat Belichick will attempt to achieve.

The longest span between Super Bowl wins was achieved by Joe Gibbs, in his first stint in Washington, where saying Redskins was politically correct within the Beltway and where his squads held aloft the Vince Lombardi Trophy in 1983, 1988 and 1992. Gibbs’ nine-year span is the mark that Belichick will try to overcome.

The history of football does not lie. It is a game that devours its young. It is a game that routinely destroys coaches by the enormous time commitment required; head coaches who burn out, breakdown and watch the game inexorably pass them by. The game holds no promises and a Super Bowl victory is far from guaranteed.

The oldest coach to win a Super Bowl was achieved by the then 65-year-old Tom Coughlin with his New York Giants in 2012. Ironically, the Giants victory came against Belichick’s Pats.

Bill Belichick will be 62 when Super Bowl XLIX is played on February, 1, 2015. In the history of the Super Bowl, only four head coaches have led their teams to a championship and been over the age of 60.

At the age of 61, Weeb Ewbank won Super Bowl III with his underdog New York Jets in 1969. Super Bowl XXXIV was garnered by the 63-year-old Dick Vermeil, who conquered burn out from his Philly years and led the St. Louis Rams to a title. 61-year-old Tom Coughlin’s New York Giants beat the greatest team ever assembled by Bill Belichick, according to Patriots Nation, ending the Pats’ 18-0 run into the postseason and securing the Giants a third Vince Lombardi Trophy in 2008. And cheatin’ Pete Carroll’s Seattle Seahawks shellacked Peyton Manning’s Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XLVII, 43-8, when Petey was 62,

Yes, a coach can win a Super Bowl in his sixties, and perhaps Belichick is the best candidate to do that but the history that suggests otherwise is immense. In 48 Super Bowls, only four winning head coaches have been in their sixties. An actuary would not place money on Belichick and his New England Patriots.

If the age of Belichick doesn’t dissuade a deep belief in the invincibility of Belichick’s 2014 Patriots, how about the age of starting quarterback Tom Brady? Brady is 37. At the age of 37 and 38, Denver’s John Elway won back-to-back Super Bowls in 1997 and 1998. At the age of 37, Jim Plunkett quarterbacked Al Davis’s silver and black Oakland Raiders to a 38-9 drubbing of a Joe Gibbs’ Washington group with a 35-year-old Joe Theismann under center. Elway and Plunkett are the two oldest quarterbacks to win Super Bowls.

The data would show that nearing the age of 40 does not equal Super Bowl wins for quarterbacks. As much as pundits like to laud the role of experience, the game of football is usually played best by young men, who can withstand the physical pounding of a sixteen-game regular season and then entry into a postseason playoff tournament. New England zealots will highlight the advances in conditioning and sports medicine that allow today’s athletes to defy the creeping effects of age, but that belief is not demonstrated in the history of the game.

Possibly a 38-year-old Peyton Manning or a 37-year-old Tom Brady can buck the odds, but their lack of youth is a problem that cannot be ignored. Manning and Brady are riding Canton-bound careers to football Valhalla, but age will win out. For those citizens in Patriot Nation, who fervently believe that Brady will play effectively into his forties, this would be a rationale only a senile Al Davis would offer. Clearly Manning’s Broncos and Brady’s Patriots appear to be the elite of the AFC, but this is a cruel game that is adverse to romance and fairy tales. Brady and Manning are staring at long odds as their bodies creep nearer to 40 than they do to 30.

The Belichick and Brady collaboration is nearing its end, and there may be one last title to grab, but ten years without a Super Bowl ring would suggest New England’s halcyon days ended some time ago.