No “Effing” Way Does White Deserve A Jets Roster Spot (But He’ll Probably Get One Anyway)
Some of you are too young to have heard of Clint Longley. He was the Cowboys backup quarterback who was forced into action during the second half of a 1974 Thanksgiving game against hated Washington in place of the injured Roger Staubach. Longley threw for 203 yards and two touchdowns, including the game-winning 50-yard bomb to Drew Pearson with 28 seconds remaining to lift Dallas to a rousing 24-23 comeback victory.
The legend of Longley pretty much died there, as he went on to toss just 48 more NFL passes before he was out of the league two years later.
Jets QB Mike White had his every-dog-has-his-day, one-hit wonder outing last season when he was called to duty following an injury to rookie starter Zach Wilson. In White’s first regular season NFL start, he shocked the Super Bowl-bound Bengals with 405 yards passing and three touchdowns to lead previously moribund Gang Green to a 34-31 Week 8 win. Thereafter, he was known as Mike “Effing” White, a tribute reportedly coined by running back Ty Johnson in his postgame comments.
Unfortunately, the reality was never going to match the hype. Just two weeks later, the Bills figured out that White doesn’t have the arm strength to push the ball downfield and picked him off four times in a 45-17 rout, White’s last appearance of the season.
Who knows why the Bengals failed to show up on that Halloween Sunday? Maybe they confused White with Luke Falk, one of the worst among a litany of awful Jets quarterbacks in my lifetime who subbed in for three forgettable games in 2019. Cincinnati allowed White to pick them apart underneath all game—his 4.2 yards average depth of target was the second-lowest among the 31 QBs with at least 10 dropbacks that day, per ProFootballFocus.com. He never even attempted a pass that travelled at least 20 air yards. A far cry from the Mad-Bombing Longley.
Jets Head Coach Robert Saleh, in his never-is-heard-a-discouraging-word universe, has been telling reporters all preseason that the Jets have three starting-caliber NFL quarterbacks in Wilson, Joe Flacco, and White. Sure--on a lousy team. If the goal is to play winning football this season, it remains to be seen, a) whether Wilson can take a leap after a poor rookie season; b) how much juice is left in Flacco’s 37-yeasr old body; and c) if White can ever replicate what he did to the Bengals.
My view is that White is the perfect practice squad QB, someone who, in an absolute emergency, can play a reasonable facsimile of an NFL signal caller. He can get you through three downs before you punt, throwing in a few nicely-placed short passes so that you can lose 27-6 instead of 27-0. Anything more regular, however, where opposing teams can concoct game plans, and you’re looking at a team that needs to tank to draft its next quarterback.
There are two reasons why White will probably make it onto New York’s 53-man roster when final cuts are made on August 30. Wilson’s up-in-the-air status (the recovery timeline from arthroscopic knee surgery suggests he could be out for longer than Week 1’s tilt against Baltimore on September 11) means the Jets would have a hole at No. 2 QB; and the Jets are fearful that White won’t make it through waivers unclaimed should he be cut.
It shouldn’t matter—and no, I’m not making a case for the fun Chris Streveler, who has led New York to a pair of comeback preseason victories, including Monday’s 24-16 defeat of visiting Atlanta. These games are meaningless when it comes to projecting regular season production, so the fact that White stunk playing with backups while Streveler improvised his way to a pair of long touchdown drives against future USFL players has no bearing on this analysis.
The point is that White, 27, does not have a future in this organization, so he shouldn’t receive preferential treatment off one outlier performance last season, not when the Jets will have to cut players at other positions who could help them this season.
Despite Streveler’s preseason showmanship, I can’t picture any other team scooping him up for their 53, making it easier for the Jets to stash him on the practice squad. So, after the Jets finish off their preseason slate on Sunday versus the Giants, their best move would be to cut both White and Streveler and go with two QBs on the roster, even with one of them injured, because of the high probability that at least one of White and/or Streveler will rejoin the team to serve as the emergency QB after 24 hours.
And if Wilson can’t stay on the field, forcing their No. 3 into more extensive action, well, that would mean that the Jets have no choice but to once again go shopping after the season for a new quarterback anyway, so every loss helps.
Well this didn't age well