I'll post the link at the bottom, but my understanding is unless you have an Athletic membership you're probably not going to be able to read it.
“Love him, man,” Jets wide receiver Garrett Wilson said of LaFleur. “My rookie year, looking back on it, it was a special time and I might’ve taken it for granted.”
I know we eviscerated the guy at the end of that season. But reading this article and after the OC dumpster fire of the last 2 years, I'm starting to miss the guy. You want worse? Apparently good ol' Woody J forced the firing, which makes me think we should have kept him just for that reason.
" the Jets ended a 15-play, 67-yard drive with a 21-yard Carlson field goal. Outside of those two scoring drives (of 99 and 67 yards) the Jets gained only 155 total yards. On a cold afternoon — the coldest of the season so far at MetLife Stadium — they only ran the ball 20 times versus 44 dropbacks. The Jets have run the ball less than any team in the NFL this season despite the presence of Hall, who expressed some frustration with his lack of carries earlier in the week: “I don’t really have too much to say, you know, just with how the season’s going, how the games are going, you know, that’s just like just how it worked out,” Hall said on Friday. “So, you know, obviously I want the ball as many times as I can, but if I’m not getting the ball out, all I can do is just my job.”"
LaFleur had Wilson as his QB, and did a good job occasionally with Mike White. I'm not saying he'd have us playing at a high offensive level in any way, but in retrospect (and I hate to admit this because I was one of the idiots saying to fire him) maybe we were a bit hasty. He's doing great again with McVay. He apparently helped redesign the offense and specifically the run team as part of their new success.
Part of this organizations problem has been and probably always will be lack of patience. But that's never going to change is it..
Edited to add: what sticks out to me is Woody demanding him to be fired, which instantly makes me think he should have stayed. Just to be contrarian to Johnson.
19 comments
He also has Stafford, Puka, Kupp and Kyren to work with, and a better O Line, so yeah I would hope he’s doing better lol
Agreed on MLF.
Our other issue is Rodgers, who is selfishly just targeting his buddy Adams. Just to get the 500th td pass to his buddy.
They scored 19 points against arguably the worst defense in the league missing their best player. This doesn’t move me.
Everyone saw 2 yrs ago, the biggest problem with the team was QB and to a degree oline, a ton of guys were hurt. LaFleur did not end well here, 15 points in the last 3 games is disgusting regardless, but the offense was functional without Zach. Smart move would’ve been to run back one more yr with LaFleur (the odds of a getting a decent OC with GM and head coach on hot seat, no QB worth a damn is very low). I think making the Rodgers trade was the best move, but I don’t know now how much of MiLF’s offense he would run, old dogs die hard and with running his older bro’s offense. Wish they made the playoffs 2 yrs ago so Woody could back off, our gm/head coach have more credibility and we could go from there.
LaFleur wasn’t very well set up for success here, but he also did a shitty job working with what he had.
Just to name one example, we all saw from day one that Wilson wasn’t ready to run an NFL offense out of the gate. And yet the Jets did none of the things that good coaches usually do to protect bad QBs (moving Wilson out of the pocket, running simple concepts to get the ball out quickly, etc.)
Similarly, it was insane to let Joe Flacco stand back there behind an awful offensive line and take a hit on every drop back while he waited for long-developing routes. Just look at what a better job the Browns did of protecting Flacco behind a similarly decimated line.
Ultimately I feel the same way about LaFleur as I do about Saleh. Maybe he wasn’t the biggest problem here but he sure as hell wasn’t the solution.
Nothing about this franchise over the last -5 years was something to miss. Sam was bad here, geno was bad here, every coaching staff has been bad here. Nothing has been good. The one constant has bern woody. Now we’re finding out that it’s likely all because of woody.
Boycott the team in every way until he sells. The only problem is, the next ownership is almost guaranteed to be worse
Nah MLF wasn’t it. He wasn’t positioned to succeed either but he wasn’t anything special. If mcvay wasnt best friends with his brother, he wouldn’t be an OC right now. Dude comes to work and collects a check and lets his head coach run the offense. Woody sucks and MLF should have been given a better chance to succeed after one year but I never viewed him as a “brilliant mind”.
People are propping up whoever they can to make it seem like we let something great slip through our fingers. All these guys were shit. I couldn’t possibly care less about how he’s doing now under a literal offensive genius in McVay. Even if he gets another gig and does well, who is to say that he would have ever done that without years of further development as a coach? It’s all absurd. We fired shitty coaches and administrators.
1) Voodoo doctor
2) Remove curse
3) fix team – 5 owners, 15 GMs, 21 head coaches.. it’s been tried changing leaders.. we have no idea the fix but it’s cursed
Nah, he was in way over his head. Would he be better for us than Hackett? Probably, but that’s a low bar to set. He deserved to be fired from the Jets. We just needed to hire someone other than Hackett.
MLF confirmed source for Rosenblatt and Russini after this b.s. article. lol the Rams won 19-9 against a defense with no Quinnen, Sauce or Michael Carter.
Lafleur’s offense tended to work while he was here, we just never had the line or QB to consistently execute it. Unfortunately when you have the worst QB bust of the last 15 years, someone has to lose their job for it
Wrote a post on this like a month ago.
This team died when we canned Mike lafleur. Had our rookies cooking with Zach fucking Wilson.
I just cant take Zach Rosenblatt seriously anymore.
I have zero problems with negative reporting but at least pretend to not be an obvious mouthpiece for an awful GM and HC trying to save their image.
>which instantly makes me think he should have stayed
Mike Lafleur was completely out of his depth here as a playcaller and did almost nothing to help Zach. He’s now basically McVays intern who only gave him a job because of his brother.
He was completely out of his depth. Part of the job of an OC is to develop young QB’s, so he shouldn’t be absolved because of the bad QB play. His playcalling was also garbage. I will say his play designs were creative and intriguing but everything else about him as an OC sucked. Praising him is borderline like praising Hackett.
As a Jets fan, never fall into the trap of thinking “it can’t get worse”. It always does.
We are 1 or 2 games away from people posting how much we miss Gase at this point.
His firing was brought about by Elijah Moore. I’m telling you that dude was our downfall. Remember how happy we were they were all using Insta to take photos together and bond? Well social wound up killing this team when EM went there with Fatty Becton to complain
Firing him was insane. Dumbest thing we ever did. It’s ground zero for the dumpster fire.