The tumultuous tenure of quarterback Zach Wilson with the New York Jets officially came to an end this offseason. He was traded to the Denver Broncos right before the 2024 NFL Draft.
All it took for the Broncos to acquire the No. 2 pick in the 2021 NFL Draft was a pick swap. They sent a sixth-round pick to New York, getting back Zach Wilson and a seventh.
The lackluster return in a trade package isn’t all too surprising. The BYU product struggled mightily in his tenure with the Jets, going 12-21 as a starter.
New York was lucky to win that many games with Zach Wilson at the helm, as he didn’t look like an NFL-caliber starting quarterback at any point in his tenure. Granted, he was improved in 2023, but the bar was very low.
One of the players who witnessed the trainwreck of 2023 was wide receiver Randall Cobb. He was signed by the Jets last offseason to reunite with his Green Bay Packers teammate, quarterback Aaron Rodgers.
That reunion lasted all of four plays, as Rodgers injured his Achilles on the first New York offensive drive of the season. Cobb was one of the least efficient receivers in the NFL in 2023, as the entire offense was stuck in the mud.
Cobb could have placed the blame on Zach Wilson for how things turned out last season for the franchise, but he went in another direction. Instead of blaming the quarterback, he placed blame on the organization for how they handled everything.
“I think in the media, it was more dramatic than it actually was,” Cobb countered, as covered by Awful Announcing.
“I think that they had told him that they were gonna trade him in the offseason, and then they benched him, and then they wanted him to play again. And then they tried to blame him for not wanting to play, but you just told him that you were gonna trade him.
“It was a lot of politics, a lot of stuff in the media, it was a lot of like, ‘Come on, man, like what are we doing here?’ A lot of meeting with the media, feeding them stuff.” (H/T New York Post)
No one is going to respond well at their place of work to that kind of treatment. Zach Wilson certainly didn’t play well enough to keep the starting job, but he was the best New York had.
That blame can be placed on the Jets. It was ownership and the front office that put all of their eggs into the Aaron Rodgers basket with no contingency plan.
When things went wrong, the team’s performance went off the rails as many people thought it would. In Cobb’s opinion, trying to pass the blame onto Zach Wilson was a bad look on the Jets and many people would agree with that.
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