David Caldwell was a candidate for the Jets' general manager position before he wound up taking the Jacksonville position and we might have found out part of the reason why the Jacksonville job was more appealing during his introductory press conference on Thursday.
Caldwell was asked about reports that Tim Tebow would make his way back to his hometown this offseason and left absolutely no debate about his feelings when he said that he saw no way that Tebow would be a Jaguar, even if he winds up being released by the Jets. Given owner Shad Khan's interest in acquiring Tebow before the fateful trade to the Jets, that suggests Caldwell wanted to go to a place where the owner wasn't putting preconditions on his employment.
Caldwell also fired coach Mike Mularkey, something he wouldn't have been able to do in New York thanks to Woody Johnson's insistence that Rex Ryan remain the team's coach through the 2013 season. That's pretty much the situation we discussed on Thursday when it came to the Jets' expanding list of G.M. candidates and the difficulties involved with hiring someone to run a football team without actually having the power to do what they want.
The comments about Tebow also rung a bit strange because there hasn't been an honest answer from the Jets involving Tebow during his entire time with the team. That leads us back to the owner making decisions about personnel that are normally left to general managers, something that winds up making the team look dysfunctional because their words and actions have about as much to do with each other as ice cream and nuclear weapons.
Don't just take my word for it. Listen to Mike Westhoff, who retired as the team's special teams coach at the end of the regular season and is thus free to reveal that all the talk about using Tebow on offense was never more than just talk.
"I don't think anyone's ever really answered that question," Westhoff said. "Why didn’t we do it? I honestly don't know. I know we didn't practice it. We didn't practice it in training camp. We were gonna unveil it. Well, I'm still waiting for the unveiling."
A while back, we suggested that Tebow only mattered as symbol of everything wrong with the Jets organization. When one of the team's key coaches is saying that Tebow was never anything more than a distraction and another G.M. breaks out of the vague nothingness of the usual press conference to make it clear he wants nothing to do with Tebow, it seems pretty clear that it was the correct take.
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Josh Alper is also a writer for Pro Football Talk. You can follow him on Twitter.
