Joe Douglas sat alone in the press box, staring blankly at the field in front of him. Reporters and Jets staffers walked by and he barely spoke. When that Sunday night game in Pittsburgh ended, the Jets’ 15-6 lead evaporating in a 37-15 loss at Acrisure Stadium, Douglas was already gone.
During the fourth quarter, Douglas took the elevator down to the lower level, went to the visitor’s locker room, grabbed his bag and retreated to the team bus where he sat, alone, during the game’s final moments. It was a fitting image: A general manager, worn down not only by the losses, but by the pressure of an owner with an increasingly heavy hand.
On Tuesday, one month later, the Jets held a walkthrough at the team facility. Some staffers were surprised to see owner Woody Johnson on the last day before the team broke for their bye week — even at a practice mandated by Johnson himself. Some suspected something was about to happen. They were right.
Douglas was fired as general manager during his sixth season on the job. Senior personnel consultant Phil Savage will take over in the interim. The Jets have already started their search for a new general manager.
— New York Jets (@nyjets) November 19, 2024
When he spoke to the media (for the last time as Jets GM) on Nov. 6, Douglas looked defeated. He was never much of a talker, but his answers were brief even for him, and devoid of emotion. Perhaps what multiple team sources, granted anonymity to discuss the inner workings of the Jets’ front office, said transpired over the last few months was weighing on him.
According to those sources, the day after the Jets’ loss to the Denver Broncos on Sept. 29, there was a contentious meeting at the team facility. It included Johnson, Douglas, vice chairman Christopher Johnson, team president Hymie Elhai, and Ira Akselrad, an advisor to Johnson. It also included a group of coaches: then-head coach Robert Saleh, offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett, then-defensive coordinator Jeff Ulbrich and special teams coordinator Brant Boyer among them.
The coaches had been called in to explain what happened with their units during the 10-9 home loss to the Broncos. During the meeting, Johnson suggested to the coaches that they bench Aaron Rodgers in favor of Tyrod Taylor because he felt Rodgers’ performance was holding the team back. The coaches and Douglas, stunned at the suggestion, talked him out of it and convinced Johnson to stay the course and that benching Rodgers, with his pedigree, four games into the season would not sit well with the locker room. The coaches also felt it would embarrass Rodgers. The idea of benching the future Hall of Famer sounded so absurd that one coach asked whether the owner was serious — multiple sources from that meeting believed he was.
Johnson was calmed that day, but the meeting set the tone for what happened a week later. On Oct. 8, Johnson made a unilateral decision to fire Saleh without consulting his general manager (or anyone else in the organization, for that matter). But really, Douglas’s free will as the GM was stripped away long before that. (Douglas did not respond to a request for comment.)
Douglas had already lost some power midway through last season when Johnson took a more active role. Example: Douglas had a contract extension offer he was getting ready to propose to defensive end Bryce Huff’s agent, but Johnson vetoed that — and any other moves involving paying new money to players on the roster. By January, Douglas seemed to have even less control. That’s when he fired assistant general manager Rex Hogan, a move that shocked many in the organization because of how close Douglas and Hogan — and their families — were. Multiple team sources theorized that Johnson forced Douglas’s hand; in the aftermath, Douglas told Jets staffers that “Woody should just fire me now.” In February, director of player personnel Chad Alexander left for an assistant GM job with the Los Angeles Chargers; Johnson didn’t allow Douglas to replace either of them. From then on, many in the Jets organization described Douglas as a shell of himself.
“They’re holding him hostage,” a team source told The Athletic.
“Joe was checked out,” said another former Jets front office member.
Last offseason, both Saleh and Douglas agreed they needed to focus on rectifying some past mistakes they’d made in free agency — specifically, they wanted to avoid aging players or ones with injury concerns. Douglas pursued a trade with the Denver Broncos for wide receiver Jerry Jeudy, offering Allen Lazard and a Day 2 draft pick, according to a league source, but Johnson nixed it. Jeudy was instead traded to the Cleveland Browns.
When offensive tackle Tyron Smith and wide receiver Mike Williams lingered after the initial wave of free-agent signings, the Jets pursued both. Multiple team sources believe this was a matter of Johnson’s preoccupation with social media factoring into the Jets’ decision-making. Douglas went along. He offered an incentive-laden one-year, $6.5 million deal worth up to $20 million with various playing-time incentives. What Douglas didn’t expect: No other teams (including the Dallas Cowboys, where Smith had spent his whole career) had expressed interest in signing Smith — so the former All-Pro accepted the Jets’ offer. The 33-year-old has allowed the most sacks of Jets offensive linemen and is currently out with a neck injury. Williams, coming off a torn ACL, also signed for a one-year, incentive-laden deal that didn’t work out. He was traded to the Pittsburgh Steelers for a fifth-round pick after nine unproductive games in the Jets offense.
Around the time Smith and Williams joined the roster, the Jets began talks to acquire Pro Bowl defensive end Haason Reddick, granted permission to seek a trade by the Eagles. Reddick, who turned 30 in September, was in the last year of his contract and wanted a new deal, which Philadelphia wasn’t going to give him. His asking price (believed to be around $25 million per season) was so high that there was little interest from other teams.
According to a league source, Douglas was warned by Reddick’s representation that if the Jets didn’t plan on awarding Reddick a new contract, they should hold off on a trade. But when Douglas found out it would only cost him a 2026 third-round pick for a player of Reddick’s caliber he did it anyway, believing that Reddick would report and the team could figure out the contract later. However, per team sources, Johnson wasn’t willing to give Reddick a new contract. And so Reddick skipped OTAs, minicamp, training camp and the first seven weeks of the regular season before finally reporting to a then-2-5 Jets team.
If it wasn’t obvious how involved Johnson was in the operation before this season started, it became clearer in October, when Saleh was fired. Johnson explained that he felt the Jets had the most talented roster the franchise had assembled in his 25 years as owner and he wanted to find a spark before it was too late, promoting Ulbrich to interim head coach. The line about the roster talent was presumably an endorsement of the work Douglas had done over the past few years, but multiple sources within the organization viewed it as more of an endorsement of the roster that Johnson felt that he had built.
On Oct. 15, Johnson pushed Douglas to trade for star Raiders wide receiver Davante Adams, giving up a conditional third-round pick — far more than other teams traded for top wide receivers at the deadline. The next day, Johnson told reporters at the owners meetings in Atlanta that “you know, thinking is overrated. You have to look forward. We have to look forward to the games we’re going to play each and every week and try to win all of them … you just have to go with your instinct and what’s the best thing to build a team.”
When he was asked if the Jets season was “salvageable” he responded: “We’re gonna kick … you can add the words after that. We’re going to do really well.”
On Sunday, the Jets benched starting safety Tony Adams at the behest of Johnson, according to a team source. Johnson also wanted the Jets to practice during their bye week, which didn’t go over well with some of the locker room’s leaders.
The Jets are 1-4 since the Adams trade, 3-8 on the season and are headed into an offseason in which they will be undertaking a full organizational reset: general manager, head coach and, probably, quarterback. Rodgers is fond of both Douglas and Ulbrich and had been hoping for some continuity in 2025. As such, it’s increasingly unlikely the quarterback returns next season, and it’s believed that Johnson won’t want him back anyway.
As for Douglas, he had his struggles as general manager. His biggest mistakes came in the failure to construct a competent offensive line until this year, as well as drafting Zach Wilson second overall in 2021, poor draft classes in ’20 and ’21 and other misses in free agency. But those mistakes were balanced out by some shrewd moves, like the impressive ’22 draft class (Sauce Gardner, Garrett Wilson, Jermaine Johnson, Breece Hall) and some successful free agent signings and waiver claims that worked out, like D.J. Reed, Quincy Williams, John Franklin-Myers and John Simpson. Ultimately, it’s difficult for any general manager to survive six years without sniffing the postseason.
Douglas wasn’t technically hired by Woody Johnson, but rather his brother Christopher Johnson, the team’s vice chairman who ran the organization for three-and-a-half years while Johnson was working in the Trump administration as the ambassador to the United Kingdom. Many in the organization were under the impression that, when Johnson returned in 2021, he wouldn’t be involved as much day-to-day.
Fast-forward to Douglas’ last press conference. He was asked about being kept out of the decision to fire Saleh.
His response: “I serve at the pleasure of the owner.”
The Athletic’s Michael Silver contributed reporting to this story.
(Top photo: Kirby Lee / Imagn Images)
