It’s the third year of the Eric Mangini-Mike Tannenbaum association in New York, and there now have been three veteran players who publicly have expressed dissatisfaction with their treatment.

First it was guard Pete Kendall.  Next, receiver Laveranues Coles.  The third man up is tight end Chris Baker.

But in each case there’s been something more than mere unhappiness projected.  Each guy has claimed that promises were made, and that said promises ultimately were not honored.

“I’m angry about the fact that they said, ‘We’re going to do something for you,’ and nothing’s being done,” Baker recently said, according to the New York Post.  “It doesn’t make any sense.  I’ve been here six years and I’ve always done what they’ve asked me to do.”

And so the deeper question, in our assessment, is whether the players think they can trust the team.  Three of them clearly don’t; two of them are still in the locker room.

Apparently, the organization made each of these guys believe that something was going to be done for them, and each of them decided that the organization failed to come through.

So what’s happening in New York?  Is the left hand making promising checks that the right hand won’t write?  Or are players misunderstanding casual comments like “you’re our guy” as commitments to increase their pay?

The problem has been amplified by the fact that the Jets spent money in free agency like guys who would naturally be inclined to spend money and who have recently ingested a beverage or a substance that might impair their judgment to a certain degree (there’s got to be a simpler analogy for that).  The splurge came only a year after Tannenbaum cautioned that “there are consequences” to shelling out huge dollars to veterans who have never played a single down with the team.

The money spent on strangers to the team is only making things worse.  In this specific case, it forced the Jets to trade back into the first round and (arguably) reach for tight end Dustin Keller, another guy who’ll get a nice pile of money despite never wearing a Jets helmet in his life.

We’re not sure how deep this river runs, but we can’t think of any other NFL franchise that has had three players call the franchise out as dishonest over the course of three decades; the fact that the Jets have had three in less than three seasons is troubling, to say the least.