The New York Jets dropped from 21st to 29th in the most recent NFLPA report card rankings with players unhappy with a lack of commitment and investment into building a winner, a poor team culture and a food program that has gone in the wrong direction.
During the NFL's annual league meetings Monday, Jets owner Woody Johnson responded to the criticisms, which included an "F" grade for ownership.
"My first read is I think it is totally bogus," Johnson said via The Athletic's Zack Rosenblatt. "I thought this whole setup the way it was done is all … that’s enough said on that. But we want to get better every day, in every category. I want to be No. 1 in everything. All of our people do. We want to be No. 1, like we are in girls flag football. We’re No. 1 or 2 in the country and that’s where [we want] to be in everything, including on the field but also off the field in all of our philanthropy. So if there’s areas we can improve, and there’s always areas we can improve — not because of this bogus report — we are going to do it."
Johnson's use of "bogus" to describe the report was because of his objection to how the data was collected and who it was collected from.
"[I]t’s supposed to be a process where we have representatives and they have representatives so we know it’s an honest survey," Johnson said. "And that was violated in my opinion. So I’ll leave it at that. But there’s a lot of owners that looked at this survey and said this is not fair, not balanced, it’s not every player, it’s not even representative of the players."
(There were 1,695 players who responded, but the survey did not specify how many players from each team participated.)
Jets players expressed that the problem areas they brought up in last year's survey were not addressed and that ownership decided to make "conditions worse" as a response.
“They talked about the culture — it’s a problem, top down,”
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