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There’s plenty of blame to go around when it comes to explaining why the Jets haven’t been able to get their act together, and Woody Johnson certainly shoulders a solid chunk of it. There are plenty of stories about the many questionable decisions the team’s owner has made, and we have a new one due to his role in vetoing a potential trade for Jerry Jeudy.
The New York Jets headed into the 2024 season nursing the longest active playoff drought in the NFL, and it will be extended to 14 years now that the team is guaranteed to finish with a losing record for the ninth consecutive campaign.
The ill-fated Aaron Rodgers experiment obviously played a sizeable role in the latest in a long line of fairly disastrous seasons, but the QB’s struggles have also highlighted the systemic dysfunction of the franchise thanks to a steady stream of reports about the way Jets owner Woody Johnson has managed the team he purchased at the start of the millennium.
Reports that have surfaced over the past few months have asserted Johnson wanted Rodgers benched in September, rubbed the QB and plenty of other players the wrong way by making the somewhat hasty decision to fire Robert Saleh, and has a tendency to let internet chatter sway his opinions on roster decisions due in part to the sway of his 18-year-old son.
However, a new report makes his alleged propensity for social media input look brilliant in comparison.
On Thursday, The Athletic published an article that shined a very bright light on the many ways Johnson has thrown his weight around while managing the franchise, and nothing jumps out more than an anecdote concerning a potential trade for former Broncos WR Jerry Jeudy earlier this year.
Now-former Jets GM Joe Douglas spent weeks working on a deal that ultimately fell through after Johnson stepped in, as the Broncos were informed “the owner felt Jeudy’s player rating in Madden…wasn’t high enough.”
Jeudy was eventually traded to the Browns, and while it’s a bit hard to imagine he would have had a huge impact in New York based on how Rodgers ended up playing, it’s still pretty hard to believe that’s why the trade failed to come to fruition.