It’s time for the 2025 JetsFix Mailbag, which will run in three parts over the next few weeks. Remember, the idea is for everyone to ask one Jets/NFL question and one non-NFL question, a rule which many of you – as always – failed to adhere to. Here’s part three:
R in CT
Jets: Of all the acquisitions this off season (free agents, draft picks, UDFA), which player do you think is either flying under the radar or no one is talking about (yes), and will have a bigger role than expected?
Josh Reynolds. Other than Justin Fields, Andre Cisco and Brandon Stephens, he was the only free agent who didn’t sign a minimum salary deal. However more column inches have been dedicated to players like Chuks Okorafor and Stone Smartt who may not even be active on gameday following the draft picks the Jets made – and Allen Lazard, Xavier Gipson and Malachi Corley, any of whom who might be gone before then.
I can’t say that he’s going to have a huge impact but I think he’s going to get a starter level workload and target share if he remains healthy and the Jets don’t acquire another established pass catcher.
Non-Jets: Who’s on your personal Mt. Rushmore of professional wrestlers? (For me, it’s guys who I just enjoyed every time they cut a promo or were involved in a crazy match or just popped up randomly, so The Undertaker, Mick Foley, The Rock, and Gold Dust … honorable mention to Kurt Angle, Honky Tonk Man, and R Truth)
Another difficult question because there’s so many different criteria you might use to make your selections. Many of the guys I liked in their prime have continued to wrestle and become washed-up or boring (Edge, Punk, Danielson etc). Ironically, that could create an advantage for those wrestlers who died young enough that they’ll always be remembered as in their prime (Eddie, Owen, Bray Wyatt, so many others). But an all-dead Mount Rushmore would be depressing.
Also a lot of my favorite wrestlers of all time never wrestled in WWE – or did but it was a letdown compared to the rest of their career. So do they belong or is it limited to WWE only?
My first instinct was to put Pat McAfee, Logan Paul, Mojo Rawley and Matt Riddle on the side of the mountain. And then nuke it.
But I guess, based on my personal favorites it would look something like:
- Andre the Giant (loved him)
- Santino Marella (for the comedy value)
- Awesome Kong (gotta have at least one female included and she was my favorite, although her performance in GLOW as “the Welfare Queen” was more memorable than her WWE run as “Kharma”)
- The Legion of Doom/Road Warriors (assuming I am allowed to have a tag team count as one entry, these guys were my favorite but, moreover, would look really cool carved into the side of a mountain).
Lam Jones (West Lam United)
Which is more likely in your opinion, the new AG staff significantly reduces penalties or significantly improves turnovers (margin)? If neither, than what other metric would you expect might be a clear and prominent result of different leadership in 2025?
I think there’s an easy answer here, based on last season.
In terms of penalties, Glenn’s unit was one of the most penalized teams in the league, 2nd only to the Jets for defensive penalties. So his defense either didn’t have great discipline or, perhaps more likely, he had a physical defense and reasoned that you’re more likely to be successful playing physical and having a high penalty count than playing soft and having a low penalty count.
You could point to all the personnel changes caused by injuries as a factor in that penalty count, so hopefully he can get that down in 2025 although he will of course now be dealing with officials who seem dead-set on screwing the Jets every week so I’d expect a marginal difference here.
Turnovers on the other hand? Even with an experienced Aaron Rodgers who should have good ball security, the Jets were only 16th in turnover margin while Detroit was 7th. New York was only 21st in takeaways while Glenn’s Lions defense placed 9th. This is where I’d expect the Jets to improve in 2025.
Why do you think Andor a) cut the scene where Mon Mothma’s husband tells her he has always known what she was up to and would have helped her if she hadn’t just assumed he was a shallow good time Charlie and b) included the late scene with Bix and the baby? Wouldn’t the former make Mon’s speech even more heavily risky and full of danger, and then wouldn’t the latter make Rogue One’s ending a lot more tragic and even a little bit upsetting?
Why mess with perfection?
In terms of Mothma/Perrin, I wonder how many people clocked the fact that the woman asleep next to Perrin in the Monmothmatage at the end of the finale wasn’t just some random broad he was taking home because Mon had left him. It was Davo Sculdun’s wife (aka Mon’s arranged marriage co-mother in law).
That creates an interesting wrinkle, implying that Mon was (not literally) in bed with Davo, who apparently was powerful in the broadcast industry and may have played a direct part in the broadcast of her senate speech not being prematurely cut off. Perrin and (apparently her name is) Runai would then have found each other and bonded over their shared experience of being sidelined.
You can choose to believe that the deleted scene happened off-screen or that it was removed because they decided that is not what would have happened in your own head canon. I think it might have been a layer too many. I liked Perrin and the dynamic of their relationship though.
I liked that Bix got a bixersweet ending, combining hope with a tinge of regret that he’ll never get to know about the child he was unknowing saving the galaxy for.
If you watched Andor, Rogue One and A New Hope for the first time in chronological order, I wonder how you’d feel about rooting for Cassian to get back safely so he can reunite with Bix and his baby and then seeing that taken away from him.
In terms of Rogue One, the series does improve that movie I think. Although the final act still doesn’t make sense – specifically these two moments:
- When K-2SO notes that now the shield is up they will have to beam the plans…but wait we can’t beam the plans because the signal won’t get through if the shield is up so we’ll have to tell them to get the shield down (even though if the shield is down now they no longer need to beam the plans and can revert to their original plan to escape Scarif in the ship); and
- Cassian goes to great lengths to tell Bodhi he must open up a communication line to the rebel fleet, which means Chirrut gets killed turning the switch on and Bodhi gets blown up getting back to his ship after getting the message out. That message? He tells Admiral Raddus they need to get the shield down. Never mind that Raddus and the fleet were already trying to get the shield down and then Raddus picks this moment to have the idea of Hammerheadcorvetting the Star Destroyer into the shieldgate. But he could have had that idea anyway because the message literally just told him to do what he was already doing.
Oh and if nothing else at least Andor spawned the greatest EDM song in the galaxy:
QuantumEraser
Jets question: What do the Jets do if they win 7 games (slightly exceed expectations of 5.5 wins) and many QB needy teams draft ahead of them in 2026?
It’s self-defeating to look at the outcome in advance as if you’re pinning all your hopes on the draft to replace the quarterback and assuming that if you won seven games, immediately addressing the quarterback position will be a priority. Justin Fields might have a very good season but the Jets lose 10 games because he missed five due to a minor injury and the defense was terrible.
So, what they will have to do is decide between the following:
- Stick with Fields (or even one of the other quarterbacks on the roster) as your 2026 starter, perhaps drafting a lesser quarterback to develop despite missing out on the best prospects at the top end;
- Draft the next best quarterback available after all the QB-needy teams have made their selection ahead of them and hope he’s the guy;
- Surrender resources to move up and get a better quarterback;
- Sign a free agent quarterback so you don’t have to draft one; or
- Trade for a veteran quarterback so you aren’t limited by the free agent pool.
Any of these could be a terrible idea or the right path.
No Jets question: If we are all going to die, why bother having Medicaid?
I don’t know. Does Medicaid cover you for the inability to retain and process basic information like mailbag question instructions?
BubbyBristerMumblin’DeadFish
Who is the Jets WR#2 and is that player enough? Should the Jets sign a WR that gets cut from another team?
They may end up doing that, unless offseason noise about rookies Arian Smith and Mason Taylor being candidates for this role have legs. I think it could end up being Josh Reynolds though.
Should a guy and girl do the horizontal hula on the first date…that is, of course, if they are both consenting?
If they are both consenting then there’s no reason to say that they shouldn’t or have any hangups over whether that’s right or wrong. It can be better if you wait, though…
It also depends on what you mean by “first date”. Does a drunken hookup where you meet someone for the first time while out count as a first date? And if it doesn’t, does that mean that if you make arrangements to meet that person again, this meeting would therefore become the first date between you even though you already hooked up? Compare that with a situation where you finally asked out someone you’ve known for some time and liked for ages and it’s a totally different scenario.
By-Tor (Exalted Lord of LA)
Jets? What’s Justin Fields? Like is he someone they feel they can develop into a long time franchise QB? Is he a placeholder? Is he a let’s see what we’ve got and take it from there?
This is similar to the question asked above. I think he came into the league as a boom-bust guy who can make an incredible play or a terrible play at any given moment. Much like Mike Vick was as a rookie.
With these kinds of quarterbacks you have to tone them down somewhat and it makes them less exciting and might mean they have fewer big plays and big statistical performances but, by playing more conservatively they give you a better chance to stay in the game more often.
So, that’s what the Steelers were aiming to do with him last year and now the Jets will build on this – perhaps less shackled because the Steelers always intended him to be a hold-the-fort guy for Russell Wilson until the end of last season and were going to move him onto the next stage this year if they re-signed him. We now get to do that instead.
Non-Jets? How do you think Larry Bird would do in today’s game given the extraordinary length and athleticism of today’s players. And what character would he be in the Star Wars universe?
The Star Wars aspect of this is easy: He’d be Crosshair from the Bad Batch. Someone who is so accurate he can only have been genetically modified, while also being kinda surly and banged-up at the end of his career.
If you’re going to insist on him being a character from the movies then I guess Yoda because of the way he constantly limped around like an old man due to all his injuries but was occasionally capable of moments of spectacular dynamic flair which saw him give younger adversaries the run-around, like when Yoda duelled with Count Dooku.
Anyway, he’d obviously be the best shooter in the league and the best passer in the league, so let’s start there.
He was also a double-digit rebounder in an era when players fought for every board rather than today where you can get 15 rebounds just by being a tall person somewhere near the basket whenever someone shoots another three and everyone runs back on defense instead of crashing the glass.
The modern consensus on him is that he wasn’t athletic, but he actually was until the injuries hit (injuries which would no doubt be resolved much more easily with modern medical advances since he retired over 30 years ago).
The book on him was also that he can’t defend. But he actually averaged MORE steals and blocks than LeBron James who has a reputation as an elite defender despite spending most of his career in a free safety role similar to what Bird used to play, but with the additional advantage of NBA defenses now being allowed to play zone which was illegal in Bird’s era.
So now let’s talk about the modern era. Bird played against and was often matched up against sensational athletes like Julius Irving and Dominique Wilkins, who are as athletic as anything the modern game has to offer. Are there many more guys on this level now? Of course, but Bird used to put up huge numbers against those guys so that just means the league is now filled with more guys who are NOT equipped to stop him – especially with the rule advantages that now exist in terms of spacing the floor, allowing footwork that used to be travelling and enabling offensive players to draw fouls more easily.
Not to mention the fact that there would now be more shooters and lob threats surrounding Bird, who was the master of setting up easy opportunities for his teammates, not just someone who got 10 assists by handling the ball a lot so he was statistically more likely to be the penultimate person to touch the ball before any made basket. His assist numbers would skyrocket in the modern game.
And you give a green light to him to shoot as many threes as he likes which everyone gets in the modern era? Watch out. Larry never shot more than SIX three point attempts in a playoff game. Steph Curry has shot more than six three point attempts in a playoff game 141 times! One hundred and forty one!
Putting side my rebuttal of any athleticism concerns above, the success of Nikola Jokic merely proves you can still thrive in the NBA without being athletic as long as you are skilled and smart. And Larry was the most skilled player ever and the smartest. So, yeah, he’d absolutely dominate the modern NBA, probably averaging 40 points, 20 rebounds and 20 assists per game.
And I would have predicted more than that but we’ve got to be realistic. I mean, he is almost 70!
Thanks again for all your amazing questions. Stick around over the next few months for plenty more coverage heading into the season…