Marrone is Reminiscent of Kotite
Marrone is Reminiscent of Kotite
NY Jets' interest in Doug Marrone is reminiscent of Rich Kotite days
If Doug Marrone, who was 6-10 and 9-7 this season with the Bills and was 25-25 when he coached Syracuse, is the end of the star search for Woody Johnson then he would have been better off staying with Rex Ryan, who has had much better results in pro football than Marrone has.
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Friday, January 2, 2015, 12:27 AM A A A
KEVIN LARKIN/AP
Leon Hess hires Rich Kotite 20 years ago to help save the Jets. What happened next was a
1-15 season.
Once, with another Jets owner in another time, the owner couldn’t believe his team’s good fortune that a coach from another team, one with a record a lot better than Doug Marrone’s was at Syracuse or with the Buffalo Bills, had suddenly become available. That coach was Rich Kotite.
Leon Hess was the owner and he said at the time that he was “80 years old and I want results now.” So he got rid of Pete Carroll and he hired Kotite away from Philadelphia, where he had won 11 games in his first season and 10 games the next and made the playoffs. But Kotite faded at the end, and the Eagles got tired of him, even though his four-year record there was 36-28.
Oh, and Kotite was local, he sure was, a Staten Island guy, and that was supposed to be a big deal at the time the way it is supposed to be some kind of big deal that Marrone is from the Bronx.
“Rich is a fighter, a builder, a ‘deze’ and ‘doze’ guy, a leader, bringing the New York Jets back,” Leon Hess said.
It all happened so fast 20 years ago, the way things seem to be moving very fast with Marrone now that he has walked away from the Bills. You start to get the idea that it is as if this is the greatest opportunity for a New York team to hire a local guy since Bill Parcells. Or Lombardi.
The Jets' interest in Doug Marrone is baffling and could very well be a regrettable move if they follow through.
JAMIE SABAU/GETTY IMAGES
The Jets' interest in Doug Marrone is baffling and could very well be a regrettable move if they follow through.
But if Doug Marrone, who was 6-10 and 9-7 this season with the Bills and was 25-25 when he coached Syracuse, is the end of the star search for Woody and what we assumed would be a crack committee that included Ron Wolf and Charley Casserly, then Woody would have been better off staying with Rex Ryan, who has had much better results in pro football than Marrone has.
It is worth pointing out again that the decisions that Woody has to make, replacing both John Idzik and Ryan, are the most important he has made since buying the Jets, because this is the lowest point for the franchise since Kotite came to the Jets and went 3-13 and then 1-15 and then Parcells did have to come here from the Patriots and save everybody.
But if Johnson is getting pushed or shoved in the direction of Marrone by Casserly and/or Ron Wolf, if this is all happening this fast when the smart thing is for Johnson to go get himself the best possible guy to be his next general manager, then he doesn’t look like an owner trying to make things right with what is a sorry operation right now.
He looks like a sucker. Or maybe a mark.
There is an old Parcells line that might be coming into play here, the one about some people in pro football not knowing whether the ball is blown up or stuffed.
This doesn’t mean Marrone is a bad football coach. He is just another coach looking for a job, even though he and his agent seem to have this idea that they have done something brilliant by leveraging Marrone away from the Bills with some big coaching jobs available in the league. You even hear that if the Jets have the incredible luck to get Doug Marrone to come coach their football team, he might have a say in who the next general manager is. And if that is true, what kind of cockeyed process are they running over in Florham Park?
Woody has to hire a new general manager first, and then if that general manager does all of his due diligence and he somehow decides that Marrone is the best man for the job — and not somebody just being agent-ed into the job — then by all means, bring Marrone here. But who thinks that will happen? The reason that you are supposed to believe that there is this tremendous momentum for Marrone to be the next Jets coach is because that is what Marrone and his agent want you to think, before Woody Johnson comes to his senses.
He has just seen, Johnson has, over the past two seasons how it usually goes in sports — not always, there are always exceptions, but most of the time — when a general manager brought in to try to turn around a franchise is forced to take on a coach he doesn’t want, or never would have hired. The result with the Jets was, wait for it, the lowest point for the team since the Kotite years.
The last thing the Jets want to do is relive the dark days of the Kotite era.
KEITH TORRIE/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
The last thing the Jets want to do is relive the dark days of the Kotite era.
Only now Woody talks about what “good news” it is that Marrone might be available. Yeah, maybe good news for the Patriots, and Dolphins and maybe even the Buffalo Bills, a team that sure did win nine games this season. Two were against the Jets. One was against a New England Patriots team basically taking a knee at the end of the regular season.
You see this all begin to play out this way, and wonder why in the world Woody or the Jets or guys such as Wolf and Casserly are acting as if there is some kind of meter running on this thing. Maybe it is true that Casserly — who gets way too much credit for the old Washington team, because he was the guy who followed Bobby Beathard — looks at Marrone and sees some budding coaching genius. But who else does?
Again: Woody Johnson hasn’t been a terrible owner with the Jets. He hasn’t. He did the right thing this past week, getting rid of Idzik when he got rid of Rex. Idzik needed to go and Rex needs a new team. But he can’t let this process get hijacked by this dumb narrative that somehow they have been presented this tremendous opportunity now that Marrone walks away from the Bills.
But somehow he says that it’s “good news” that Marrone is in play. Leon Hess said the exact same thing about another local guy once
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