If Douglas Adams were A) still alive and B) a Jets fan, he might have this to say to us all: DON’T PANIC.

Of the many negative narratives that have engulfed the Jets this offseason, there is none sillier than the idea that this is a team that “does not take care of its own.” The operating assumption of these foolish meme is that team management has become so fixated on tacking on flashy, expensive cast-offs from other teams (think Santonio Holmes, Braylon Edwards), that they’ve come to neglect home grown talent raised up through the team system Superficially, this argument appears to make sense. After all, Darrelle Revis, David Harris, Nick Mangold, D’Brickashaw Ferguson and Shaun Ellis all came up through the Draft, and are now fighting for restructured contracts and extensions. Meanwhile, the team coldly and callously dealt injured Jets product Leon Washington to Seattle, and handed out pink slips to beloved leaders Thomas Jones and Alan Faneca (who, while not Jets by birth, if you will, had become core members of the team).

This trend – ship out Jones, bring in LT; say goodbye Kerry Rhodes, hello Cromartie – looks really bad. Factor in the ridiculous claim that we are the “paper champions” or “Madden champions” of the league (as though we’ve yet had a chance to prove otherwise), and you get a news story. But does it hold up? Well, if you were to believe absolutely pundit in the world, prior to the mechanization of the current regime, the Jets were soft. We had a long history of losing, a dearth of star players and did not make the moves needed to correct this. A few years ago, Tannenbaum shredded our roster and brought in guys like Faneca, Damien Woody, Kris Jenkins and Brett Favre, and with the exception of the latter, I didn’t hear anyone calling them “mercenaries” then. But now that we’ve grown too big for our britches, now that we’ve got the talent and the leadership to go all the way, idiots like Mike Florio deride the very formula that has brought us success. I don’t believe there is some kind of worldwide anti-Jets conspiracy, but, for now at least, most media outlets seem to enjoy dirtying our laundry and airing it out for us.

Sturm und Drang und Revis is a post from: The Jets Kvetch, the world’s #1 NY Jets fan site!

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