2018 JetsFix Mailbag

Welcome to the JetsFix Mailbag! Remember, everyone was supposed to ask one Jets/NFL question and one non-NFL question. Questions are in italics with the responses in normal text.

Thanks for all the great questions. Here comes part two - let's get to it!

Rocky Mountain Jet •

JETS Question: What do you think the Jets should do with Teddy Bridgewater? I think a lot of it depends on how Darnold looks, but if Teddy is playing lights out in TC and preseason even if Darnold is coming along, what do the Jets do?

While the temptation is to trade him, if the Jets are faced with a quarterback that's playing lights out in training camp and they trade him away, they might regret that for years to come.

Yes, they have a potential surplus there, but if you can't imagine a top five pick turning out to be a bust or a veteran overachiever regressing to the mean in his second season then you haven't got a very long memory.

After the Eagles and Vikings both made postseason runs essentially because they had what many people would view as one quarterback too many, the Jets shouldn't underestimate the importance of the position and mustn't look a gift horse in the mouth if it looks like they finally got themselves a good one.

Maybe they could release Josh McCown and convince him to join their coaching staff. He could then be reactivated in the event of a late-season emergency.

Non Jets Question: What Star Wars characters will have their own stand alone movies in the next 4 years? Will we finally see a Jar Jar origin story?

Ideally all of them. Literally every Star Wars character ever. I'd still go to 300 Star Wars movies over a four-year period given the chance. Star Wars fatigue be damned.

Realistically though, I think we will probably only see one more standalone in the next four years with all the non-standalone stuff they have in the pipeline. It looked like it was going to be Obi-Wan and I think it would be awesome to see Ewan back in that role, but whatever they do will probably cross streams with the other standalones anyway so it almost doesn't matter who's in the middle on the poster.

They just need to be careful with how they market them. I've said before that a Bounty Hunter-themed movie is a can't miss but if they market it as a Boba Fett story it'll probably bomb.

Luna Staernberger •

JETS Question: What are the chances Jets fans mend their hell deep skepticism?

Personally, I don't think I'll ever get over it. If they can find a way to blow a game, I'll expect them to do so. And if we have high expectations, I'll always expect them to let me down.

Even in a season when everything seems encouraging, my mindset never surpasses cautiously pessimistic.

The only way to get past it is to win. And one day we will...but when we do I bet I won't be the only one who still thinks we're going to find a way to blow it right up to the last moment, even if we're comfortably ahead.

Non NFL question: What are the chances Jets fans mend their hell deep skepticism?

I don't know much about Winnipeg hockey fans. They're probably just happy to have their franchise back.

SumJetsFan •

If you were the GM would you had made the decision to move up in draft? And would you have taken Darnold at 3?

I would not have traded up, although maybe my fan perspective clouds that because more picks = more draft fun! On balance, I figure the Jets could have still landed one of the top quarterbacks, whom I had ranked pretty closely together.

If they didn't make the move then maybe they would have been able to land Rosen for a lower overall price, but they probably still would've had to trade up to be sure and if they really didn't rate Allen it would have been risky, so I get why they did it.

Having made the trade, once they were in the third slot and the first two went Mayfield-Barkley, I think Darnold was probably the pick I would have made and hopefully it will prove to be the correct one.

Why is England playing so poorly against India in the ongoing cricket T20 and one day matches?

Are they? See I wouldn't even know that if you didn't tell me. It's probably because kids don't play much cricket these days so the pool of players is diminishing.

When I was in school (so this is going back 25 years) some cricket coach for the county team (so, a pretty big deal) showed up to one of our phys. ed. lessons and we all thought we'd learn how to hit etc. Instead, this grumpy bastard yelled at anyone who swung the bat and forced us to practice the interminably dull action of playing a defensive shot. (In cricket, you don't have to run if you hit the ball, so you're allowed to block it just to ensure you don't get out).

He told us you can't learn to hit properly until you've mastered how to play defensively. This was the only thing we did. For an hour. So it went from being "hey this could be cool" to "this is the most boring sport ever and I never want to play it again".

You'd have thought he'd have worked on something remotely exciting to try and get some kids into the game. It was like if I went to coach a basketball session but instead of letting people dribble and shoot we spent the whole hour setting screens. And now the talent level of English cricket is paying the price of that dumb know-it-all attitude. (Good.)

Hazard2012 •

Jets Q: Which positional unit (QB, WR, RB, TE, OL, DL, LB, DB, ST) do you think will show the most improvement this year over last season?

The offensive line was so bad that it just has to be the offensive line. There's reasons for optimism - Long is definitely much better than Johnson and even Swanson is an upgrade, plus Dennison knows what he's doing and the health will hopefully be better - but even if the line is still bad, they could still have improved more than the other position groups who might have gone from average to good or whatever.

Non Jets/NFL Q: Who will kill Cersei and the Night King in the final season of GOT?

Ah, but what if Cersei IS the Night King? WHAT THEN.

Think about it. You know it to be true.

All those time inconsistencies and apparent plot holes over the last season were no accident. Clearly space and time are becoming dilated. To be more specific, the known world - which had always been ambiguously mapped - is obviously warping into a helical shape which can render distances insignificant if you tunnel through the core of the earth at the right angle - and of course Cersei has full access to the system of tunnels beneath King's Landing.

Cersei has been able to exploit this by tunneling short distances between areas which are far apart on the map. You've never seen Cersei and the Night King in the same place and you've also rarely seen the Night King doing much during nightfall (despite his name), which is when most of the tunneling would obviously take place.

Maester Qyburn is the only person who knows about this. He revived the Mountain so a bit of prosthetic work certainly isn't beyond him.

Eventually Cersei will be on the verge of being rumbled, so she'll fake her own death and pretend that she has become the Night Queen without revealing her true identity, which will remain concealed throughout season eight thanks to some quick thinking wig deployment as the show is unexpectedly set to veer off in an Mrs. Doubtfire-esque direction.

So who kills her/him? Nobody ... (s)he is doomed to rule over a kingdom of none as the sole survivor of the great war.

Coming up in Part III - More Star Wars, soccer and the Simpsons...plus some Jets stuff!