new york jets

Happy Monday, friends, and welcome to The Mothership.  We've got a couple more teams going fishing, and we'll explore their situations.  We'll also devote some early thought to the Super Bowl matchup.  Finally, since the Senior Bowl is this week, we'll get into that a little bit, and possibly also consider the less important Pro Bowl.  The NFC Championship game isn't over yet, as I start writing this, but I want to get a couple thousand words written before midnight.  Ready..... BEGIN!!!

1.  Both championship games were very interesting on Sunday, after the first two weekends had a lot of blowouts, and a few uninteresting close games.  I would venture to say that the only entertaining game in the first two weeks was Arizona vs. Green Bay.  It was a good Football Sunday, and we'll start by thinking about the losers.

a.  New York Jets - First of all, let me reiterate that anybody who made it to their conference championship game had a good season.  That said, this was not the year New York planned to be in Super Bowl contention, so I think they were already playing with house money on Sunday.  They wanted to win, and I know they believed that they could, but they're still developing into what they ultimately want to become.

First things first, since the MSM will always focus on the QB position first.  Mark Sanchez generally has a ways to go as a decision maker, but he showed a lot of poise during the recent run, and it has to make Jets fans very excited for the future.  He had a good day on Sunday, and the two TD passes he threw each showed a quality that the elite QBs possess.  He showed outstanding touch on the deep ball on the first, and impressive toughness and accuracy under pressure on the second.  My concerns about his ability to play in bad weather aside, it's pretty clear that the Jets have their guy of the future.

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I am writing this pre-launch, to accomplish a few tasks, actually, but I hope it's a value-adding piece of content, and not just a throwaway for taxonomy building's sake.  I was talking to my father over Christmas about coaching trees, and their associated ideologies, and it struck me as something worth exploring, and writing about.  For all 32 teams, each coach came from somewhere, and learned distinguishable strategies and schematic ideas.  We're going to look at each team, and try to make some sense of this landscape.

Buffalo Bills -- Perry Fewell (Interim Coach)

Fewell comes from the tree of the man he replaced, Dick Jauron, and has worked for him for years, in Jacksonville, Chicago, and Buffalo.  He worked for Mike Martz and Lovie Smith in St. Louis too, but that's a secondary relationship.  It's a little bit tough to place Fewell, because it's tough to place Jauron.  Jauron worked for Hank Bullough (a key figure in 3-4 history), Lindy Infante, Mike Holmgren, and Tom Coughlin.  That's 4 totally unrelated coaching philosophies there.  I'm going to have to decline to declare Jauron as being part of any tree, because his roots go so many different directions, and say that Fewell is not part of a specific tree either.

Miami Dolphins -- Tony Sparano

There's no question that Sparano comes from the Bill Parcells Tree.  He worked briefly for Chris Palmer in Cleveland, Marty Schottenheimer in Washington, and Tom Coughlin in Jacksonville, but his career took off when Parcells hired him in Dallas in 2003.  Parcells, of course, continues to be his boss in Miami.  This one is a no-brainer.

New York Jets -- Rex Ryan

He worked under Brian Billick and Mike Nolan for a lot of years, and under Jim Harbaugh for one, but Ryan seems to be most influenced by his father Buddy.  He isn't particularly related to many other coaches in the NFL nowadays, and his approach to defense is very original.  I'll give his dad, Buddy, his own Buddy Ryan Tree, because another branch or two will hit there as well.

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