If BB was pissed (and we're making assumptions here, we're not inside his head) it was because Mangini showed a lack of respect for his mentor advice. Not for team reasons. You make wild leaps of assumptions using phrases such as "that badly" to try to make your case. Its a common tactic but again, you aren't in his head. You just inserted that in there passing over the analysis of what you actually know for a fact. You assume it was "that badly" with not much thought, it appears. You state it as fact. You weren't there. You don't know how badly BB wanted to keep him. And, again, as I speculated (not claimed I knew), it could be for inter-personal reasons, not team reasons.
Mangini's performance as coordinator was abysmal. Period. That we know.
And the numbers as Jets coach speak for themselves. I didn't invent them. You igorred those facts.
J D Sal
Now you're the one making assumptions based on nothing more than your own perception of what was wrong with this D in 2005. Aside from losing Rodney, TJ, Tedy and getting saddled with Starks and Beisel for all or parts of the season...that is.
It's pretty well documented that Mangini was was not your run of the mill young assistant promoted to coordinator, he was Bill's protogee and friend. As Michael Holley pointed out in Patriots Reign, unlike Bill's other support staff, he and Mangini could fight heatedly like father and son for an hour over defensive concepts and then stroll onto the practice field beaming like brothers. And that was when he was still just an assistant, and Romeo was the DC.
Eric's problem is, was and always will be an overabundance of ego, likely fed by the media spin of him as the golden child ball boy discovery of the master. Like most children he probably believed he was inherently smarter than the dad and easily convinced himself the dad just wasn't too keen on his proving it. So he took the job where he obviously could - and it blew up in his face because as is so often the case, father knew best. He could have gotten away with failing in another venue, and the surrogate father would have had his back as had his before him. But he wanted to prove his superiority by taking down old pops in his own back yard. And the father likely would have forgiven that in time, he had already moved past the cold stare to a bearhug once he publicly throttled the kid.
Only when as year 2 unfolded and it proved to be a lot tougher to beat the old man than young Eric's ego envisioned, he succombed to the temptation to try a little dagger in the back aimed at knocking the old man off stride. Only that too blew up in his face even worse. And now he's left facing 2008 fighting for his NFL life with no pops to bail him out 'cause the old man has now thoroughly and likely permanently disowned him.
The truth about Mangini is he struggled daily to check his ego at the door of Gillette, and at the first opportunity to bolt it convinced him to make a move just a touch of street savvy and common sense clearly dictated he pass on. Typical bright kid overly impressed with his own perceived intelligence and oblivious to his own shortsightedness, he couldn't take advantage of the wisdom BB tried to impart based on 30 years experience and a decade of mentoring and friendship.
That ego will make it even harder for him to go back to being somebody elses NFL coordinator, if he even gets a chance. I mean, this is a man who's done Sprint commercials and guested on the Sopranos... More likely he persues a college HC job where he can at least convince himself he remains intellectually superior to his peers and he will receive a seven figure salary and some head man perks albeit on a local level.
