Joe Douglas Hired as New York Jets General Manger

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By Paul Bowman, Sports Talk Philly Editor

The Eagles lost one of their most valuable assets on Friday in the form of Joe Douglas.

Considered the favorite for the Jets vacant general manager position since the position became available, the New York Jets have made the move official, according to Adam Schefter of ESPN.

Jets just would not take “no” as an answer from Joe Douglas. He tried to turn down the Jets and each time he did, they came back at him harder and harder. Jets simply were not going to be denied in their efforts to land the former Eagles’ vice president of player personnel.

— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) June 8, 2019

Interestingly enough, Schefter reports that Douglas turned the Jets down multiple times, so the team must have offered Douglas quite a pretty penny to force him into taking the position.

Not wanting to take the job with the Jets is understandable as the team went out this offseason and let their previous GM hire a new head coach, spend big money on a running back and linebacker and draft his own players before they fired him. Not only that, but the new head coach, Adam Gase has already told the media he did not want to sign arguably the biggest star on the team (Le’Veon Bell) and is fresh off of being fired from Miami for a combination of power grabbing, poor coaching and creating locker room issues, as he has already done for the Jets.

Douglas, of course, was a key part in the Eagles winning a Super Bowl in 2017 as Douglas built a personnel department that evaluated not just talent, but character and locker room fit as well. It is Douglas that can be thanked for the culture of the team today.

Of concern for the Eagles now is their personnel department. Douglas is surely a big loss, but he created the team’s personnel department. Who will Douglas be able to convince to make the move to the Jets with him?

The Eagles will likely need to make a long string of internal promotions quickly in an attempt to compete with Joe Douglas offering them the same position. The Birds will need that and a cohesive culture in the front office in order to hope to keep the department largely intact.

Joe Douglas was always going to get an offer to be a GM at some point, so the Eagles can at least be glad that the Jets are so dysfunctional that they allowed Philadelphia to retain Douglas’ expertise for another offseason before New York decided to move on from their previous general manager.