Sources: Jets may hire head coach without a general manager in place

They may be without a general manager but the Jets are carrying on with the search to not only replace John Idzik but also head coach Rex Ryan. And the search for both positions starts this week, even without a general manager in place.

On Wednesday, the Jets began interviewing candidates for the head coaching position, including running backs coach Anthony Lynn. It may seem out of the ordinary that a head coach could possibly be hired without a general manager in place, but the process is nonetheless beginning in earnest as the team begins doing its due diligence on potential candidates for the position.

Metro has learned that with the lack of a general manager to spearhead the effort, four individuals will be on-site to conduct interviews for the head coach position: Jets owner Woody Johnson, team president Neil Glat as well as consultants Charlie Casserly and Ron Wolf.

Casserly and Wolf, both of whom serve on the NFL Career Advisory Panel and are themselves longtime NFL executives, will be on-site at the team’s facility for these interviews.

The ideal plan for this process is to hire a general manager first and then a head coach. But a team source tells Metro that if the Jets felt like they needed to move on a head coaching candidate who they felt was the perfect fit in order to ensure that he could be hired, they would be open to the “need to move on a head before finalizing [the] general manager.”

This obviously would go against their ideal flowchart for this process but would be “a battlefield decision based on circumstances,” another source tells Metro.

The organization was criticized two years ago for bringingIdzik on board as general manager with a head coach already in place. By inheriting Ryan, this ensured that Idzik was unable to bring in “his man” into the relationship to run the team. On Monday, when he spoke to the media after firing Idzik and Ryan, Johnson acknowledged that the plan put in motion two years ago may not have been ideal and may have led to the team’s lack of success in building a winner the past two years.