I wrote an article in 2023 that I knew would be received mostly poorly. I did it anyway because I thought the thesis was interesting and worth talking about. At the time, the comments were not all rosy. Here are some examples:

• “Find something else to write about, but this useless speculation and fantasy land dribble…”
• “And now this article. Do you really just hate the Jets? I have (during my time on GGN) not seen an article I wanted to distance myself from as this one.”
• “So 37% of the voters think Rex is insane, but preferred to turn him down respectfully.”

So what was that article? Well, I proposed that the Jets should consider trading cornerback Sauce Gardner. You can read the whole thing here if you want. Two years later, here we are as he was traded just earlier today.

I don’t write this to say that I was right. The New York Jets traded Sauce Gardner and only time will tell if that decision ends up being a good one. It’s a decision that can only be judged with the hindsight of who they take and how they develop which can only come with time. To that point, I don’t know who those players will be, nonetheless how they’ll develop, so how can I know I was right? Through that lens, I completely understood those above comments at the time and I still do now. There’s a lot of ways that this could go wrong, but there’s also logic in making it because there are a lot of ways that it can go right.

So what I’d like to do is try to explain the logic of why General Manager Darren Mougey may have made this trade. If I had to guess, it’s probably for the types of reasons that I laid out so I think I might be uniquely qualified to do just that. With that said, I’d like to highlight a few paragraphs that I wrote just under 24 months ago:

“If we think about what a football team is at its core, then it is really just an allocation of resources. Some players will be good. Those are valuable resources. Some will be bad. Those are not valuable resources. What you hope is that the sum of all those resources is good enough to compete with the sum of every other team’s resources. For the Jets, the quality of those resources is extremely skewed towards the defense, while the offense limps around in a state of (seemingly perpetual) woe.”

…“It’s important to note that when I say resources I don’t mean money or draft picks spent. I view those as theoretical resources. They can be used to acquire resources so they’re valuable, but the real “resource” that a team wants is player talent. As shown here, the Jets have player talent on defense; they also have basically none of offense. And the goal of an NFL team isn’t to have the best defense (or the best offense for that matter), but rather the best team. Right now, it seems like a far stretch that the Jets are going to have the best team with anything resembling their current offensive personnel.“

…“To that point, I would argue that Sauce is, in fact, the Jets most valuable player when accounting for both talent and his rookie contract that pays him well below what he’d get on the open market. Given that, this positions trading Sauce as the quickest way to even out the resource disparity between the offense and the defense via trading him for players and/or draft picks that can then be distributed to the offense.”

Two years later, the Jets offense still looks poor despite being in a league that is defined by offense. They have two good young offensive lineman, one good wide receiver, and one promising young tight end. That isn’t enough to support a young quarterback and it sure looks like the Jets are going to be positioned to take one in the upcoming draft. If so, you have to give that guy a chance to be great, and a great cornerback doesn’t help with that in the way that even a good, not great second wide receiver or serviceable offensive lineman will. The Jets needed to reallocate resources to focus on offense and the future… and trading Sauce Gardner (and defensive tackle Quinnen Williams) gives them a clear path to try to do that in short order.

In other words, there’s pain that’s doled out in making this trade and you have to hope it allows for gains. I’ll miss watching Sauce play as much as anyone because I love cornerback play as much as anyone, but I can see the plan taking form for the Jets. Truthfully, I think it’s the most promising plan that the team has had in years and now we just have to hope that it pans out.