Jets And Jamison Crowder Agree To 3-Year, $28.5 Million Deal
The first real domino of free agency has dropped for Jets fans and frankly I’m very happy with it. Obviously we still have much bigger fish to fry and nobody is winning any championships because of Jamison Crowder. But if you’re sitting around cranky over this deal you need to get your head out of your ass because
A. That’s not healthy and it probably hurts
and
B. I’m gonna break it down for you right now
This is a good signing for the Jets. The WR market is pretty much doo-doo this offseason. Depending at how you look at it, Adam Humphries was probably the top guy available (off of 2018 production), with other names like Golden Tate and Danny Amendola floating around. But there was nobody who you could classify as a pure game-changer available.
Jamison Crowder is coming off a year where he produced career lows while only playing in 9 games due to an ankle injury, though if you look back to the year prior, it’s easy to see why Adam Gase got excited about bringing Crowder in to work the middle of the field with Chris Herndon next year. He’s an excellent route runner who can take short completions and turn them into chunk plays with his speed and quickness. Also, his name is Jamison which although spelled differently, is the same name as a very popular type of whiskey. I don’t know what that has to do with football but I like whiskey so we’re just gonna run with it.
Back to the free agent market, because I’m seeing a lot of people who seem to be uncomfortable with the numbers, let’s take a look at the other WR deal that dropped today. The aforementioned Adam Humphries just got $36 million over 4 years from the Titans. I haven’t seen any guaranteed $$ but it averages out to something very similar to what the Jets are giving Crowder. Obviously Humphries gets the extra year, which also makes sense because he’s only 25, but either way these deals are about the same. So basically that tells me that the top handful of WRs are all gonna get similar deals, and this really came down to the Jets falling for Crowder’s versatility (I’m ignoring the possibility that he was the only guy who wanted to come to the Jets).
It’ll be interesting to see the contracts the rest of the WRs get, but I guess my point here is this: It doesn’t matter at all because the market is completely dictated by availability at any given position and right now WR is looking quite thin. It’s basically Monopoly money (especially with the Jets working with about $93 million in cap space), and the Jets did what they had to do to improve the slot WR position, something very important to Adam Gase’s offense and even more vital to Sam Darnold’s development.
Now we sit back and wait to see what else the Jets have up their sleeves.