NFL Open Thread: Gase’d

Connoisseurs of bad coaching need to appreciate what we have the next few weeks (maybe.) Being an incompetent coach is hardly unusual, but generally there are recurring patterns. Dan Quinn is the classic genial coordinator on a championship team who had some success but was ultimately over his head as a head coach, and Bill O’Brien and Matt Patricia are the latest Belichick disciples to try to emulate the master’s bluntness and distance without his genius or his professionalism, with hilarious results (unless you root for those teams,) granting that the Patricia case is the most extreme failure since Mangini.

But Adam Gase — wow, man. A couple weeks ago Gase turned over playcalling to his nonthreatening no-name OC, and the Jets offense started to show signs of competence. This isn’t surprising, as you don’t exactly have to be Bill Walsh to improve on Gase’s game plans:

On the field, Gase’s game plans hew strictly to Zeno’s Paradoxes: The offense always strives to gain half the distance needed for a first down, even if it means calling an 18-inch pass on 3rd-and-1. It’s a system which was only successful when Gase coordinated Peyton Manning’s Denver Broncos offense in 2013 and 2014 [well, sat on the sideline with a tablet, anyway –ed.] Like O’Brien (who coached Tom Brady during the late-middle of his career) and Patricia (who in 2017 helped a Patriots team that always wins the Super Bowl to almost win the Super Bowl), Gase successfully parlayed a brief brush with a Hall of Famer into a head coaching career. But Gase has proved more adept than the others this season at sidestepping consequences.

Incredibly insecure even as his coaching career circles the drain, Gase seized back control of playcalling, resulting in a 6-point performance against a middle-of-the-pack defense. This is when things got surreal:

However, Gase cannot abide being upstaged by a subordinate. So when Darnold returned to face the Miami Dolphins in Week 12, Gase was holding the play sheet and talking into the headset, Loggains was wandering the sideline chatting with players and other coaches, and the Jets scored six whole points.

The overwhelming evidence suggests that Gase was calling plays again, right? Well, Gase insisted that he wasn’t in a bizarre postgame exchange with the Jets media.

Here’s Ralph Vacchiano of SNY.tv with video of Gase claiming that Loggains tells him “three plays” at the start of a series that the Jets will execute, with Gase taking over for third-down play calling, as well as “some of the two minute stuff” when the Jets were trailing. “It’s not hard. It’s not hard,” a testy Gase says, sounding like a shifty, sweaty lawyer with hair dye streaming down his cheeks.

No, it’s not hard at all. Loggains calls a series of plays off the top of his head without a play sheet, then relays them to Gase instead of communicating directly to Darnold, except on third downs, and except in two-minute situations, which (watch the video again) now happen in the third quarter for some reason. Totally logical, efficient and 100 percent truthful, coach.

Gase must have been the sort of teenager who swore he was holding that stack of Playboys and collection of roach clips for a friend, and that he wrote “Property of Adam Gase” all over them to throw that friend’s super-strict parents even further off the trail.

Gase doesn’t want anyone to know that he called plays on Sunday because the Jets offense was terrible again, and because he doesn’t want anyone to think of him as an insecure control freak who feels threatened by an assistant’s success.

He’s a beauty. I wish he could coach the Jets forever.