4 biggest mistakes that cost Joe Douglas his job with the Jets

This nightmarish New York Jets season claimed yet another victim on Tuesday, as owner Woody Johnson announced that the team had fired general manager Joe Douglas. Over five-plus seasons as New York's lead executive, Douglas failed to get Gang Green back to the playoffs, posting a 30-64 record overall and never winning more than seven games in a season. The NFL is ultimately a results business, and not many GMs would manage to keep their jobs after results like that.

Of course, even despite the lack of on-field success, Douglas still has his defenders. The team's roster is still littered with early draft picks he hit on — Sauce Gardner, Garrett Wilson, Will McDonald IV, Breece Hall — and he was hardly the only source of the Jets' dysfunction over the last few years. But lest you start feeling too badly for Douglas, allow us to remind you that a few smart selections do not an effective GM make. It takes a lot more than that to build a successful organization, and while Douglas shouldn't bear all of the blame for things going south in New York, he hasn't exactly covered himself in glory either.

4. Failing to support Sam Darnold

It's easy to forget now, but there were reasons for optimism early on in Darnold's tenure with the Jets. After a 4-12 rookie season, New York went 7-6 with Darnold under center in 2019, including six wins in eight games to close the regular season. He was still very much a work in progress, to be sure, but it was the most optimism the Jets had had at the position in quite some time. Douglas didn't draft Darnold, but he'd been handed a top-five pick at quarterback whom it was now his job to develop.

And how did Douglas respond to that responsibility? He single-handedly tanked Darnold's offensive line, handing out contracts to the likes of George Fant, Connor McGovern and Greg Van Roten in free agency. Oh, and after Darnold's favorite target, Robbie Chosen, left town, Douglas replaced him with ... Breshad Perriman. Unsurprisingly, Darnold's pressure and sack rates both spiked in 2020, while the Jets offense cratered amid a 2-14 campaign. The quarterback never came back from it, only re-emerging this season when he finally found a competent organization willing to give him a shot.

3. The 2020 NFL Draft

Of course, Douglas' free-agent misses that spring may not have looked so dire had his draft been less of a disaster. For all the talk about his recent success early in the draft, Douglas' first two picks in 2020 set the franchise back years. Ostensible franchise tackle Mekhi Becton alternated between hurt and disgruntled, while second-round pick Denzel Mims struggled to stay on the field despite New York's thin depth chart at wide receiver.

Again, this was a golden opportunity for Douglas to put a support system in place around a young, talented quarterback, and he failed miserably. If you want to give Douglas a pass for how 2019 and 2020 played out because he wasn't the one who chose Darnold, fair enough, but he also did him no favors. And when Douglas did finally get his pick at quarterback, things got even worse.

2. Drafting Zach Wilson

This is far from revisionist history. There were plenty of reasons to be skeptical of Wilson even at the time: He wasn't on anybody's draft radar until 2020, when he lit up a tissue-soft schedule amid the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic. Sure, he looked great in shorts at BYU's pro day, but the argument to take Wilson as high as No. 2 overall was always a flimsy one.

But that didn't stop Douglas, who believed that he'd finally found his man. You probably know what happened next: Wilson was an abject disaster in New York, throwing 25 picks to just 23 touchdowns while completing 57 percent of his passes over three years as the starter. And to make matters even worse, the rest of the Jets' roster began to develop into something interesting right around him, only to be held back by the quarterback. It makes you wonder how things might have played out had Douglas built better around Darnold initially.

1. Capitulating entirely to Aaron Rodgers

It's rare for a general manager to get a second crack at getting QB right, but Johnson was willing to give Douglas the benefit of the doubt. With a roster ready to win now, Douglas didn't want to roll the dice on another youngster. So he went in the opposite direction, mortgaging the team's future in order to acquire Aaron Rodgers from the Green Bay Packers.

Never mind that Rodgers was pushing 40, or that his decline was already evident over his final years in Green Bay, or that Matt LaFleur and the Packers front office seemed all too willing to move on from his future Hall of Famer. Douglas was desperate for his guy, so much so that he not only gave up picks and cap space to land Rodgers but proceeded to give him more or less total control over both the offensive coaching staff and personnel.

You can defend the Rodgers deal as a calculated risk; the Jets defense looked ready to compete, and while Rodgers was evidently not the guy he was in his prime, he still figured to have enough left in the tank to at least carry an average offense. But allowing him to install Nathaniel Hackett as offensive coordinator and old friends like Randall Cobb and Allen Lazard was a fatal mistake, both on the field and off. Sure, Rodgers' torn Achilles was a bit of very bad luck, but once Douglas had made clear that this was Rodgers' franchise, it was all downhill.