There’s a lot of current front-office drama around the New York Jets, who fired general manager Mike Maccagnan last week (making Mike Francesa look foolish and Mike Lombardi look prescient). On Tuesday, Manish Mehta of The New York Daily News added some media drama in there, tweeting that the team didn’t plan to hire a search firm or consultant while looking for their new GM, but that Fox/NFL Network’s Peter Schrager (co-host of NFLN’s Good Morning Football and a sideline reporter for Fox’s NFL broadcasts) might be “contacted for assistance”:
Jets won’t be hiring a search firm/consultant for GM search like they did for the previous two hires.
However, they’ve told people that TV personality & sideline reporter Peter Schrager could be contacted for assistance on prospective candidates. His name has come up internally
— Manish Mehta (@MMehtaSports) May 21, 2019
This then sparked a lot of refutations from other Jets’ reporters, who said Schrager’s conversations with the Jets were only about working on their preseason telecasts:
A Jets source said that while the team respects Peter Schrager, the only conversations the team has had with the broadcaster are about him working on their preseason telecasts. #nyj
— Brian Costello (@BrianCoz) May 21, 2019
From my understanding, while the #Jets respect Peter Schrager, their discussions with him have only been about working the team’s preseason telecasts. Nothing else.
— Connor Hughes (@Connor_J_Hughes) May 21, 2019
The Jets are talking with Fox Sports Peter Schrager about a role on their preseason telecasts, according to a team source. The Jets have a high respect for @Pschrags, but it does not appear that they are consulting him on their GM search.
— Ralph Vacchiano (@RalphVacchiano) May 21, 2019
Of course, it’s possible that all of these reports are correct if you consider the tense and the softness of Mehta’s tweet. His tweet only had “could be contacted,” not that the Jets had actually contacted Schrager for GM search help, and while the talks Jets’ executives have had with him so far may only be about the preseason sideline broadcasting job, those talks may have bolstered their opinion of his connections and his ability to provide “assistance on prospective candidates.” And “assistance on prospective candidates” is such a vague term; that could mean anything from “Hey, do you have a phone number for this guy?” to “Which of these guys do you think would make a good GM?” (That also makes this a bit of a strange report to put out there; the Jets not using a search firm or hiring a consultant is newsworthy, but adding that Schrager “could be contacted for assistance” adds a whole lot of vagueness and uncertainty as to what’s going on, especially with those subsequent refutations.)
It’s also possible that someone at the Jets leaked this idea to Mehta to see how it would be received on Twitter and how fans would react. (And there’s been a lot of negative reaction there, so maybe that would lead to them not contacting Schrager on this front even if they had initially planned to.) But unfortunately, Schrager himself has not yet weighed in on this publicly, so we don’t have his side of what’s going on here. And that’s too bad; if there was ever a great time for a SCHRAGERBOMB, this would be it.
[Manish Mehta on Twitter]
