Mike Celizic

Before last week, there was a large segment of New York Jets fans who didn’t think Herm Edwards was that good of a coach and weren’t sure they wanted him to say. Now, there’s an even larger group that thinks he’s the worst human being since the Unabomber for wanting to leave.

You’ll never get rich selling fans of anything on the idea that you can’t have it both ways. You can’t get angry at a guy for wanting to leave the job you don’t think he’s capable of handling. Not that the local fans and columnists and talk-show hosts will accept that. They’ve been beating on Edwards like a piñata, and in their minds, he deserves it.

Back in November, when the rumors began circulating about Kansas City wanting Edwards to succeed Dick Vermeil as coach of the Chiefs, Edwards was forthright and definitive. He wanted to remain in New York. He wanted to continue coaching the Jets for the next 10 years. He had no intention of going anywhere.

His sin, according to the critics who have become legion in New York, is being a double-talking weasel. He took over the Kansas City Chiefs as head coach Monday, and he must have known he was going there all along. Everything he said in November about wanting to remain with the Jets was nothing but a putrid pack of prevarications, or, in the vernacular, rotten lies.

I don’t think so, and I don’t blame Edwards for getting out of town. If you were in his shoes, you’d do the same.

He declared his devotion to the team he had taken to the playoffs three times in four years. He did that while making a salary that sounds extremely good – around $2 million a year – but is in reality in the bottom third or quarter, depending on which reports you read, of the league. He did that while facing the final year of his contract.

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But the Jets didn’t return his devotion. With the team bereft of its first-, second- and third-string quarterbacks, with star running back Curtis Martin and All Pro center Kevin Mawae out for the year, the Jets slid into a 4-12 black hole.

And while the team floundered and Edwards did his best to wring another victory out of a lost season, management did and said nothing to back him up.

He said he wanted to stay, but management didn’t call him in to offer an extension, which is customary when you have somebody you want to keep entering the final year of a deal. Management didn’t offer a raise. For six weeks, it didn’t say much of anything about Edwards.