Jets fans have heard it all when it comes to excuses from the front office. The beleaguered New York franchise continues the longest playoff drought of any major league men’s sports team, a situation blamed on everything from management and coaching to players and locker room culture. Fans have likewise heard every promise of reckless schemes sold as the team’s salvation, from Sam Darnold’s short-lived rebuild to Aaron Rodgers’ infamous gamble.
Now, the organization has new plans to break the historic drought. It’s all about AI.
New report by sports business journal The Jets’ front office has announced a concerted push to incorporate AI into daily operations. Roughly 91% of front office staff now use Microsoft Copilot on a daily basis, according to Iwao Fushiro, who was recently named the Jets’ chief data and analytics officer.
“I call it Level 1, or Horizon 1. It’s adoption,” Fushiro said. sports business. “Are there significant business benefits from that Level 1? No. But has the culture across the front office changed? Yes. Because we’re putting AI first.”
A department-level AI workshop led by digital consulting firm Next League sports business Staff reported that they “generated” a whopping 60 ideas for where to implement AI across the front office, with “probably double that” on the football side.
The real question, of course, is whether any of those ideas were good ideas. Overall, it remains a mystery how the mere introduction of AI would change the depressing reality of the Jets organization.
The AI initiative and Fujiro’s appointment are the brainchild of Jets owner Woody Johnson, the great-grandson of namesake Johnson & Johnson founder Robert Wood Johnson. The Jets mogul, who is often said to be easily influenced by well-liked friends and public sentiment, clearly doesn’t realize that the notoriously sycophantic engineer will probably tell him whatever he wants to hear. But Johnson’s longtime fan base lacks such characteristics.
“Aircraft has finally admitted that they need to outsource their information because there is no information in the building itself,” one Redditor quipped. “I’ll go with 0 wins and 17 losses.” a fan wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
“Lol, I asked ChatGPT. [to] “‘Make the Jets a Super Bowl contender,’ which basically meant removing literally everyone from the Jets,” one New York Giants fan wrote on Reddit. “Some of its top recommendations were to completely replace the coaching staff and somehow have a top-10 offense by year two.”
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