New York, NY- “It appears your season has ended. It is dark and cold. How will you find the light?”
- Turn to page 15 to “escort” GM Mike Tannenbaum out of the building
- Turn to page 21 to wrap Tim Tebow in a giant red bow and ship to Jacksonville, fo free.
- Turn to page 30 to shop Mark Sanchez around, find no suitors and be forced to eat his $8.25 million 2013 contract while he rides the pine…
Ahhh yes. Choose Your Own Adventure. Back in the day, these books were the bee’s knees. My mom used to get upset at me for reading them because they weren’t “stimulating or educational whatsoever,” which to be honest – is completely true. I may have felt like I was plotting my own course through some fantasy pre-pubescent conundrum, but of course the outcomes of all of my options were pre-determined… and someone usually died. We have finally reached a point in this New York Jets season where the burning hulk of the plane has finally crashed and burned. Mercifully on this flight there was no drugged up Denzel to perform some miraculous maneuver. What’s done is done, and I for one feel good. I feel fresh. There will be no 9-7 season only to have the football gods keep them on the post season sidelines. There will be no 9-7 season in which the Jets get boombashed yet again by the Patriots in the first round and receive a middling draft pick in April. It’s over. And this is where our adventure begins…
In my opinion, there is only one way to read a Choose Your Own Adventure book… by making the worst/most dangerous decisions possible. And because this Jets circus is too hilarious for even the meanest drill sergeant to straighten out, I will attempt to fight fire with fire.
Bring Me Their Heads!
Who will take the fall? Choose any combo of the following:
GM Mike Tannenbaum
Offensive Coordinator Glasses McGee (Tony Sporano)
Rex Ryan
Mark “Sanchize”.
Before I get into this, let me say that I’m pretty sure the Jets are currently wrapping Tim Tebow up in a giant red bow with plans to send him to Jacksonville, where some dreamy dude will give him to his way too hot wife for Christmas in front of his way-too-big house. Full stop. He’s not playing football in any meaningful way again. Not after the way the Jets curb-stomped his quarterbacking/wildcatting/personal protecting aspirations. PR stunt. Moving on…
In a perfect, rational world in which $8.25 million dollars is not guaranteed to Mark Sanchez next year (Thanks Mr. T!), everyone but Ryan would be gone. But we do not live in a rational world.
Exhibit A: The Jet’s owner is named Woody Johnson [insert boyhood jokes here]. Instead, we live in an ironic world (see: Brooklyn… the borough) where the owner of a recently disgraced football franchise is literally a walking boner joke, and where a team whose fan base was guaranteed a Super Bowl win once in 1969 hasn’t seen its team in the big game since then… despite a four-year blizzard of braggadocios hot air.
Sadly, in this realistic world, where constraints on this team’s natural development were thrown up like a hastily yet well-built temporary Costa Rican rodeo fence (long, painful personal story there), by none other than Mike Tannenbaum, only two of the four aforementioned names will NOT be back in the building next year…. Tannenbaum himself and Wildcat genius Tony Sporano. Yup Sanchez will be back. Yeah. Sorry.
Rex and his belly of laughs will be back too! Hooray!!! He weighed 400 pounds four years ago and was actually impossible to move. Now, though lighter on his toes, he’s not getting canned. After all, why would you ever fire a coach who by his own admission, …didn’t have his finger on the pulse of the locker room? This is the kind of clueless character you need in a Choose Your Own Adventure novel. Rex stays.
As much as I hate to say it, for financial reasons alone, the Jets will have to bring Sanchez back. It’s hard to eat $8.25 million, remain under cap and field a team capable of beating anyone but a D-3 college team, simultaneously. Unless the new management (Bill Polian, Mike Holmgren anyone?) decides to start fresh – a disaster which would put the Jets ten years or so behind the perennial division winning Patriots – Sanchez will stay through 2013. I’d go on but none of that analysis would be funny.
Skipping to the end of the story, because it’s fun (but mostly because Short Matt has me on an 800 word leash) I’d like to make some bold predictions for the 2013 Jets, throwing all caution to the wind and probably losing all credibility with the readership in the process:
GM: Bill Polian (Children can dream, can’t they?)
Head Coach: If I had to shake it up here, I’d say Andy Reid (Rex is traded down the Turnpike for Andy, a la Wife-Swap, but not nearly as hot)
O Coordinator: Chip Kelly (Because Michael Vick is gonna be a Jet)
QB: Michael Vick (Package deal with Andy. Chip and Michael are bringing the Big O to Met Life)
Backup QB: Rex Grossman (There must always be a Rex on the sideline)
Quarterbacks Coach: Vinny Testaverde (Because I haven’t heard that beautiful name in a long time)
Pretty, pretty please: Mark Sanchez: Oakland Raiders, eating hot dogs on the bench. Where he belongs.
Different Matt Chooses His Own Adventure, tomorrow.
