Early in October, after New York Jets owner Woody Johnson had fired head coach Robert Saleh after a 2-3 start, a source with ties to the Johnson family was attempting to contextualize the franchise's future and turned the conversation into an unexpected direction. Despite 12 games still left on the schedule, staffers were already feeling an uneasy sense of the season unraveling. Saleh’s firing had been unnecessarily messy, general manager Joe Douglas was powerless and looking over his shoulder, and quarterback Aaron Rodgers seemed agitated with ownership.

Quietly, some staffers began to wonder if the only steadying force would be something entirely outside the realm of football. Maybe, they reasoned, politics would fix the Jets’ top-down problem — which swirled almost entirely around Johnson.

“We’ll see how the [presidential] election goes,” one source said in early October, referring to a possible Donald Trump win. “Maybe that changes some things for everyone.”

This was not an isolated contemplation. The election was thought of by several Jets sources as a potential compass-fixer for the organization. The underlying reasoning had nothing to do with Trump or any kind of political convictions. It was entirely about Johnson. Or more specifically, getting Woody out of the way. Maybe Trump would win the election and send Johnson away again on some far-flung ambassadorship — giving him something else to think about … or at least cutting down on the number of hours he thought about his Jets.

It didn’t happen, of course. Trump won the election but didn’t award any post to Johnson, despite giving the Jets owner the ambassadorial position to the United Kingdom during his last administration. So Johnson stays put, moving forward with the Jets in a way that makes me think about former Washington Commanders owner Dan Snyder. I’ll get to that in a moment. But first, back to that whole October conversation about just hoping something would get Woody out of the way.

I’ve thought about that conversation several times in the past four months, including when Douglas was eventually fired from his dream job but ultimately responded privately with a sense of relief. I thought about it when the Jets went hunting for their next head coach, and I realized this mess and Woody Johnson would be new head coach Aaron Glenn’s best shot at finally holding the reins on game day. I thought about it during the Jets’ (maybe gerrymandered) general manager search, which featured former NFL executive Rick Spielman being hired to help run the process — then ended with the hiring of Darren Mougey away from the Denver Broncos … and Mougey hiring Spielman as a senior adviser on his staff. It's a sequence of events that is explainable in the NFL’s world of buddy networks, but also looks at least a little weird.

Perhaps more than ever, I thought of that October conversation again Wednesday, when the NFLPA released its annual confidential player-polled report card, a report that featured only one NFL team owner getting an “F” rating from his own players: Woody Johnson.

The three-pronged review was nothing less than brutal, noting:

• Owner Woody Johnson’s average rating for perceived willingness to invest in the facilities is 5.58 out of 10 from Jets players, a ranking of 32 out of 32 club owners in the league.

• The players feel that Johnson does not contribute to a positive team culture, a rank of 32 out of 32.

• The players feel that Johnson is somewhat committed to building a competitive team, a rank of 31 of the 32 NFL franchise owners.

The hits didn’t stop there, either. According to the union’s report:

The only way that could have been more scathing is if it worked in Bill Belichick’s “ready, fire, aim” assessment of how Johnson runs his franchise.

In the simplest terms, Woody Johnson’s players pointed to him as the biggest problem in their franchise, while also suggesting that the last time he was criticized by his locker room in the previous year’s report card, he retaliated by cutting some amenities and a staffer.

This is where I get back to thinking about Snyder. For decades, NFL team owners groused in private about Snyder taking over a cornerstone franchise and then running it into the ground. Eventually, his problems extended as far off the field as on it. And less than two years after he mega-yachted his way into the sunset, his former franchise experienced an immediate renaissance rarely seen in professional sports. Not only that, but the players have immediately noted the improvements under new owner Josh Harris, reflecting in an overall report card rating that took the Commanders from 32nd overall in 2023 and 2024 to 11th in 2025.

The NFL’s club owners and commissioner Roger Goodell never break ranks and say it publicly, but they know when they have a bad owner in a city positioned for greatness — and it drives them nuts. And that’s what they have on their hands with Johnson running the Jets. He’s in the league’s largest television market, featured in the most visible city in the United States, with a fan base that remains excruciatingly connected despite winning less than 43% of their games since Johnson bought the franchise.

And while that overall failure hasn’t quite fallen to Dan Snyder levels, it has certainly been trending in that direction for more than a decade. Lest we forget, it hasn’t come without some eyebrow raising off the field, either. It wasn’t that long ago that Johnson was under a 2020 U.S. State Department investigation for allegations of racist and sexist remarks during his tenure as UK ambassador — a probe that was eventually shuttered as “unsubstantiated” days before the end of Trump’s first presidential term.

The closing of that whole ordeal was a much-welcomed result for the NFL, which would have had a Snyder-esque mess on its hands if the findings had gone another way. But the fact that a state department investigation even occurred in the first place — which CNN reported as being driven by allegations delivered to an independent inspector general — isn’t great, either.

The remaining silver lining is that Johnson hasn’t crossed into territory where his fellow club owners have to weigh in on his impact to the rest of the league. And as recently as late January, he told reporters he had “to be a better owner” while introducing Glenn and Mougey.

“I’m trying to be better,” Johnson said. “And I do self-scout and a lot of people scout for me.”

If we’ve learned anything with bad team owners, proclamations about getting better don’t mean much. And the trick is to stop just listening to the people you ask to scout for you and to start listening to the people who offer reviews that weren’t solicited by ownership. For the Jets and Woody, that should start with the players. On Wednesday, they sent a message to Johnson that overlaps with nearly everyone else who has looked at the franchise.

The owner is the first problem. Everything else is secondary. Until he changes that reality himself — or it gets bad enough for the NFL to start leaning on Woody like it was eventually forced to lean on Dan Snyder — this Woody wart gets only bigger, uglier and more reviled.