General manager candidates not tied to an NFL team can begin interviewing for vacant jobs at any point, whereas staffers currently employed elsewhere cannot. Two such candidates are set to factor into the Jets’ GM search.
The Jets are planning GM interviews with former Titans front office boss Jon Robinson and longtime ESPN analyst Louis Riddick, ESPN’s Adam Schefter tweets. Robinson will go first, with Schefter adding his Jets meeting is slated to occur this week. Riddick’s is on track to take place at a later date.
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Robinson, 48, has not resurfaced since his December 2022 Titans ouster. Amy Adams Strunk booted her seventh-year GM despite having given him a lengthy extension earlier in 2022. Robinson’s Titans contract ran through the 2027 draft, which has continued to cost the team money while he is out of the NFL. No possible offset has emerged yet, as is also the case with Mike Vrabel, whom the club canned in January. Vrabel is firmly in play to land another HC job in 2025, while his five-year decision-making partner is now back on the radar as well.
The Titans hired Robinson in 2016 and produced four winning seasons, including four playoff berths, with the ex-Patriots exec at the helm. Tennessee made a habit of surprising most during this span, rivaling the AFC’s top powers despite Ryan Tannehill not checking in near the top tier among quarterbacks. The Titans went 9-7 in 2017, upsetting the Chiefs in the wild-card round, and then replaced Mike Mularkey with Vrabel. Tennessee then voyaged to the 2019 AFC championship game, where a Chiefs team then armed with Patrick Mahomes at quarterback eliminated the resurgent Titans, and then won the AFC South in 2020 — Derrick Henry‘s 2,000-yard season. The 2021 Titans went 13-4 to deny the Chiefs the AFC’s top seed, doing so despite a number of injuries, but fell to the Bengals in that year’s divisional round.
Tennessee’s Robinson-built rosters running into regular injury trouble became an issue for Adams Strunk, who also fired her GM soon after A.J. Brown put together a strong revenge game in a December 2022 Titans-Eagles matchup. Robinson had traded Brown during the 2022 draft, doing so after underwhelming the standout wide receiver during extension talks. While Adams Strunk said she had made her decision regardless of the Brown performance, the timing of the separation nevertheless proved interesting.
Riddick, 55, has been a regular on the GM interview circuit. Though, he has not interviewed for a post since the 2022 offseason. The Steelers met with the former NFL exec that year, but three clubs — the Jaguars, Lions and Texans — conducted Riddick meetings in 2021. Riddick, who played in the NFL from 1991-99 before serving as an exec with Washington and Philadelphia, also interviewed for the Giants’ GM job in 2017.
Ex-Jets GM Mike Tannenbaum and former Vikings honcho Rick Spielman are running the Jets’ GM and HC searches. Tannenbaum and Riddick were each with the Browns in 1995, the former as a lower-level staffer and the latter a backup DB. More candidates will be included in this hunt, but two unattached aspirants will get the ball rolling here.
