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Fundamentally, the biggest failure of the Mike Tannenbaum Era was an inability to self-scout and reasonably evaluate the players on team itself. That's why we saw players getting extensions and more playing time than they deserved. Today, Mark Sanchez made some interesting comments.
“It’s a lot like my rookie year. When everybody from the front office and everybody who works upstairs that you rarely see is out there with their notepads and you’re doing warmups.”
Sanchez said he sees them writing down the details to every play. “Every throw, every hand off. . . . It’s just funny to see everybody else out there charting stuff.”
“When you take a step back, you’re sipping water and you just kind of give glance around. It’s like ‘doesn’t that guy work upstairs?’ What’s he doing?"
“Everything’s under scrutiny. There’s a ton of pressure. But that’s the way you like it. That’s why you play the position and it makes it fun.”
By most accounts, at least if you trust what the beat reporters are indicating, Geno Smith is "winning" the quarterback competition, so I'm not sure how much fun it will be for Sanchez in the future. That aside, it's a positive thing to see the front office actually getting out there and self-evaluating the roster. Self-evaluation is where you find your weaknesses, so you can find the solutions. Without it, you'll overrate your strengths, or underrate your weaknesses, and then when you actually play the game, you'll only find out you're mistaken once it's too late. That was the problem after the New York Jets lost to the Pittsburgh Steelers in the AFC Championship; they overrated themselves and thought they were closer to the Super Bowl than they actually were, and they didn't take the necessary steps to push themselves over the hump.
By being proactive, the team gives itself time to try to find corrections so that they don't get embarrassed on game day. It hasn't even been a week of training camp, but it's encouraging to see the front office out there actually doing their jobs. It's something we saw very little of the past few years.