New York Jets Writers: How Far Will They Go For Attention?

Dec 31, 2013; Atlanta, GA, USA; Texas A

It’s been a quiet few days in Jetsland with the season coming to an end, Rex Ryan staying on as coach and not being in the playoffs so you have a lot of writers with too much time on their hands. That leads us to today when two separate articles were written not with the author’s opinion but instead using an opinion that would get attention. Rich Cimini of ESPNNewYork.com wrote a blog post entitled “Broadway Johnny? Jets should be so lucky” and ProFootballFocus.com put out their 2013 PFF Defensive Rookie of the Year (hint: it wasn’t Sheldon Richardson).

Rich Cimini wrote a blog post on Wednesday saying that the Jets should do everything in their power to draft Johnny Manziel in the upcoming NFL Draft including trading multiple picks to do so. You can read that here. He compared Manziel to Joe Namath for an example of how you can party and still play well in New York. He quoted Dan Henning who said Manziel is a “Tebow if Tebow could pass.” Cimini called Manziel “one of the best and most exciting college football players of his generation”. He also added that as long as Manziel is committed to football the off field stuff shouldn’t be a problem. This from a guy who called Kenrick Ellis a “druggie” when the Jets selected him. Also in a post from March 2nd, 2013 Cimini calls the Tebow trade the worst in franchise history and cites the months of back page headlines and negative publicity as one of the reasons but now that’s ok to “let TMZ become part of the organizational lexicon”? His own offseason recap listed offensive weapons as the Jets biggest need and now it’s ok to trade “high draft picks” for Manziel? The post is hypocritical, designed to get Rich page hits and maybe some spots on ESPN Radio and SportsCenter and nothing else.

Pro Football Focus gave out their Defensive Rookie of the Year Award today to Desmond Trufant of the Atlanta Falcons. Trufant is a fine player who had a good season and reasonable people can have differing opinions, but the reason they deserve to be taken to task is that they had a weekly column called “The Race For Rookie of the Year” which detailed who their leader was from week to week. The assumption was that whoever led at the end of the year would win the award. Today’s article (linked here) announcing the winner links to the weekly column but then adds that “…now I’ve invited some fellow analysts into the discussion to help name the PFF awards”. Wait, what? After having a race that Sheldon Richardson essentially led from start to finish and in the last week Richardson was listed as 1st while Trufant was 6th (see that here) you suddenly decide you are going to let a panel pick a winner? Their reasoning was that Trufant led the league in pass breakups and had 53% completion against him (Milliner had 51% by the way just saying) and it is harder to be a rookie corner than defensive lineman which is another part of the equation that was never mentioned in their weekly column. They made Trufant their Defensive Rookie of the Year because they wanted to be different from the mainstream and not choose the favorite for the award. The fact that he was a Jet made it all the better. They got people talking about Pro Football Focus and that’s what they wanted.

These writers got what they wanted today and that was page hits and word of mouth. They succeeded in that account but it is it worth your credibility to write things that are clearly hypocritical?