Gregg Williams and the Politics of Conspiracy Theories

On Monday the Jets fired their Defensive Coordinator Gregg Williams after a play so preposterous it led to accusations of tanking. Up by four late in the game, all the Jets had to do was keep the Raiders from 46 yards in 13 seconds. Instead, Williams ran a Cover 0 blitz, sending seven defenders at the Las Vegas quarterback and leaving a rookie cornerback all alone in man-to-man coverage. Predictably, he was outrun by the faster wide receiver, who caught a pass wide open and waltzed into the end zone for the game winning touchdown.

The play was so preposterous that a lot of fans immediately assumed the Jets were trying to lose. After all, the Jets are currently on track to land the #1 overall pick in next spring’s NFL Draft, but a single win could knock them back. Of course, by Monday the conventional wisdom had swung the other way. Williams is known for his unconventional late game defenses, and ultimately he was fired, with Head Coach Adam Gase specifically citing his frustration with the defense in that moment.

But it wasn’t crazy for fans to assume the Jets were tanking, at least at first. Tanking is just part of sports now, and it’s obvious to any football fan why the Jets would want to finish 0-16 this season. For one, the book on their 2020 season is effectively over—they were 0-11 going into the Raiders game, meaning that even if they somehow won every game left on their schedule, they’d still finish last in the AFC East. Meanwhile, Trevor Lawrence, the likely #1 pick in the Draft, looks like a potential franchise quarterback. Not only that, but having the first pick makes the Jets job more attractive to top coaching candidates this off-season, after the team fires Gase, which most fans assume is inevitable. In fact, not tanking would be stupid—the #1 pick is simply too valuable.

And yet the minute you point all this out, you start to sound like a conspiracy theorist. People will point out that Williams and Gase obviously don’t want to lose—this game cost Williams his job, and losing out will likely cost Gase his. The players certainly don’t want to lose—their careers are too short to think about the long-term interests of the franchise like that, and many won’t even be on the Jets next year. The Jets just screwed up, which is what they do, which is why they are 0-11.

Of course, this is true, but it also misses the point. The frustrating thing about tanking discourse is the same thing that is so frustrating about all conspiracy theory discourse: It hinges on arbitrary details instead of the larger structures at play. The specific question of whether Williams called this defense to lose becomes more important than more structural questions: Why was Williams, a disgraced coordinator who has already coached the defense of an 0-16 team, calling defenses for the Jets? (Because the franchise didn’t trust Gase to run the defense.) Why did the Jets have a Head Coach who couldn’t exert influence over the defense? (Because Gates was supposedly an offensive mastermind brought in to develop Sam Darnold.) Why did the Jets prioritize a guy who had a dubious reputation as an offensive mastermind over an actually accomplished coach? (Because developing a young quarterback is the key to success in the NFL, which is coincidentally the same reason that Jets fans want Trevor Lawrence.)

In other words, the reason people want the Jets to tank is ultimately the same reason they are in position to tank in the first place: Having a franchise quarterback is so incredibly valuable—almost every Super Bowl team of the last 15 years has been led by a future Hall of Famer or a high draft pick still on his rookie contract—that it is basically irrational to try to compete if you don’t have one, especially if you think tanking can help you get one. This seems like a structural problem for the NFL, but rather than acknowledging it directly, we get lost in endless discussions of whether the Jets are technically trying to lose, or if they are just set up to fail.

Conspiracy theories face the same issue. The big ones focus on the criminal equivalents of Williams’ Cover 0 defense: a President getting shot during a parade in broad daylight, the world’s most famous sexual predator dying suspiciously in jail, a terrorist network from across the globe brings down the tallest buildings in the biggest city in the world’s only superpower, etc. These things seem so crazy that they demand some nefarious explanation.

But the best one is that usually just that sometimes weird shit happens. This doesn’t mean every conspiracy theory is fake—just as saying Williams didn’t give up the touchdown on purpose doesn’t mean the Jets weren’t happy to lose—but that focusing on the improbable usually misses the point. A properly functioning conspiracy doesn’t actually require anyone to do anything out of the ordinary—incentives simply align in such a way that ensures a desirable but morally dubious outcome. Sometimes the system breaks down and you have to kill someone in jail or blitz seven players with a four point lead, but the scary thing is how often the system actually works well.