In reality, we’re about to find out what it’s like when you burn it all. Forget NFL platitudes, words like rebuild And retool. Forget promising a new dawn or a new era. Forget the typical NFL renaissance cycle in which a new head coach and new quarterback can help silence the echoes of previous mistakes and ineptitude. It’s raw, scorched earth. They are rocks and rubble; an absolutely barren cemetery where good thoughts and good vibrations once existed. What the New York Jets are doing cannot be described as anything other than arson.

We’re about to find out what happens when you fire your head coach five weeks into the season, one game out of first place, after losing patience following losses to the Denver Broncos (currently No. 7 seeds in the AFC playoff race). ) and the Minnesota Vikings (with a historically good defense) by one score each. We’re about to find out what happens when, after that, you absolutely destroy the promising career of a great defensive coordinator and future head coach, who was thrown into utter chaos as a interim coach with few resources and a 40 The 12-year-old quarterback is still trying to find his rhythm. We’re about to find out what happens when, after that, you fire a general manager with only a few weeks left on his contract; the kind of guy who was tipped off to this place, was a good soul, football mind and promising personnel man who earned the franchise Offensive and Defensive Rookie of the Year honors in the same draft class . Joe Douglas, who was fired Tuesday afternoonhad his successes and his failures, but he did not deserve to be sent off with just over a month to go before the end of the season. Nobody does it.

There seems to be some sort of belief these days that this is how we move forward. We plunder. We plunder. We raise a middle finger when something isn’t exactly to our specifications. We ignore the big picture and assume that the next soothsayer will save us. But I don’t know who will save the Jets. I don’t know who would want to. It’s best to keep some things behind tape so you don’t infect everyone.

We will rationalize Douglas’ firing due to his record (30-64), the same way we rationalized The dismissal of Robert Saleh. Of course, the record doesn’t reflect the work it took to clean up since the last blowtorch job; the latest artificial comet to crash into this building, pitting a coach and a general manager against each other and plunging the team into an abyss. Adam Gase, Le’Veon Bell, Mike Maccagnan… this looks like another franchise line.”We didn’t start the fire.”

And this one will be worse. Because of the frenzied pressure to turn this team into a contender, most of the young talent will be astronomically expensive by the time the Jets are ready to sniff a meaningful game. How did you feel needing to trade Darrelle Revis? Are you ready for this to happen to Sauce Gardner and Garrett Wilson as well? By the time the Jets move on from Aaron Rodgers, find their next quarterback and sort out the roster, Gardner will appear in a market that offers $25 million per season for top cornerbacks. Wilson? Try $35 million for a high-end wide receiver.

Gardner is a player I feel particularly sorry for. He arrived determined to change this culture and to wear the badge of chief recruiter with pride. He avoided the concrete narrative about this team and its past because Saleh gave him the power to do so.

Now he and Wilson and Quinnen Williams don’t feel that different from Revis, from Muhammad Wilkerson, from Damon Harrison, from Sheldon Richardson, from Sam Darnold, from Jamal Adams, from any other player who has walked into this building and is hardened. old hearts skip a beat for a while before they too are smothered by this cyclical nightmare of layoffs and chaos. They too thought there was a chance they could build something here. Be part of the recovery. They too had to find light elsewhere.

I don’t want to sound alarmist after the dismissal of a CEO aged 30 to 64. But hey, I hope there’s a plan this time. Damn, I hope the strongman approach can fix this place. While I don’t subscribe to the theory that living and working in perpetual fear gets the best out of someone, I hope that the next group of bright-eyed people who take a job out there can exist in this kind of environment that not only kicks butt. unceremoniously, but requires you to prove yourself elsewhere before people excuse that black hole on your CV.

What happens next, at least in the coming weeks, is anyone’s guess. But we can take a strange kind of comfort from knowing how this will end. Rocks and rubble. Grilled earth.