There’s a saying in business, sports teams and everything else.  The people around you represent you.  Or to put it in layman’s terms.

You’re only as good as your supporting cast.

I was reading an article today about my favorite football team.  And don’t get me wrong.  I don’t really care what they do because at this point it’s not really tied to the outcome of them.  They’ve been a losing organization for 50 years.  It’s been 50 years since they made the Superbowl.

They draft poorly.

It doesn’t matter who runs the New York Jets.

Because it’s the people who do the hiring are clearly screwing up.

The Johnson brothers are successful men thanks to their parents.  They own the Johnson & Johnson Company.  Clearly have too much money, so when they bought a football team they thought to themselves, well, we can do this.  The problem is they never made their family’s money.  Their money was made.  They inherited that money.  They worked the family business.  Not everybody can be Johnson & Johnson.

When you look at a sports team from a self-made millionaire, they tend to — they’re better at hiring.  Maybe not Daniel Sneider, but a lot of the other ones.

So if you look at the Jets, and you look at the history of the Jets, they’ve had four coaches, three GMs.  The GMs are terrible.  It all starts with who you hire.

Their general manager right now is terrible.

The only way he’s going to be successful is if he can successfully draft.

Why?  Well, because they don’t hire the right talent evaluators.  Maybe they’ve got too big of an ego.  Maybe them themselves can’t evaluate talents.

But this all falls with the Johnsons.  The Johnsons, never hired somebody who was a stud.  What they did was they did arranged marriages.

Then they hired Tod Bowls.

It was an arranged marriage.

A true GM, would never, ever take that job when a coach is forced upon them because a true GM, knows that if he has the right coach and if he drafts the right players, he’ll be able to have  a good success run.  The problem with the Jets was you had a rookie GM, with a rookie coach.  The only person who would take that job was a rookie GM.  That all comes back to the Johnsons.

Their supporting cast, their track record of hiring, 19 years of owning the team, has been terrible.  Take away Rex Ryans’ miracle, two years with Marc Sanchez as a quarterback, and the rest of the time was very mediocre.

They’re at another crossroads for their organization.  The question is, based on their past, what makes them think they’re actually going to get it right?  McKagonen is going to get a free pass.

Tod Bowls is going to get fired and McKagonen is going to have a chance to hire his own coach.  The problem is a good coach is not going to want to be there because they know the track record of this GM, and the way he drafts is not fantastic.  Not only that.  He’s a dead man, walking because if the coach fails in the first two years, the GM, is going to be gone too and a new coach is going to be hired.  It comes down to any organization, who you hire.

Shows exactly how you run an organization.  The Johnsons, they have been handed all of that money from the Johnson & Johnson Company.  But they’re terrible at running an organization and terrible at running a football team.  And if you think things are going to change after 19 years, it’s not.  And what can you learn from the New York Jets?

You can learn that it takes hiring the right person in order to make you look good.  They’ve hired dummies, and they’ve made them look bad.  They’re at a major crossroad.  Will they hire another dummy coach, another dumb GM?  Or will they actually get it right?  I’m betting.

That they screw up again because that’s who they are.