Live from MetLife Stadium, it’s ‘Saturday Night Jets’

Jets fans probably should tune in late to Saturday night’s game against the Dolphins. The Jets don’t usually do anything in the first half anyway. Over the past two weeks, the Jets were outscored 41-6 in the first half. They bounced back to beat the 49ers in overtime last week, but never recovered against the Colts the week before that.

Slow starts have been an issue all season for the 4-9 Jets. They have been outscored 89-39 in first quarters and 97-82 in the second this season.

“I don’t know what to say about the slow starts,” running back Matt Forte said. “We talked about it before the game [last week]. Coach was like, ‘We want to go out there and start fast.’ We did the exact opposite. We just talked about that.

“You can never control the flow of the game and how it goes, especially how it starts off. All you can do is go out there and start with intensity. Everybody, obviously, was looking to start fast and it didn’t work out that way. We ended up finishing strong. It’s just one of those things. The flow of the game in the NFL is a funny thing.”

It has been a bad look for the Jets and their coaches. At various times they have looked sluggish, unprepared and unmotivated at the start of games.

“It’s on everybody,” coach Todd Bowles said. “It’s on coaching, it’s on the players that’s out there. You can coach everything and put it in the right place. But then they have to play and execute the right way as well. So you think you have something down then you go into the game with something that you know you want to run, offensively or defensively, even special teams, and then you see it break down. Or sometimes not even a breakdown: It’s a missed tackle, it’s a dropped ball, it’s a penalty, it’s something within a realm of the game that you don’t want to see early on. “It’s very frustrating.” The Jets get to try to play the role of spoiler against the 8-5 Dolphins, who are fighting for a wild card, but lost starting quarterback Ryan Tannehill last week to a knee injury.

The Jets have a home game in prime time for the second time in three weeks. The last one was a 41-10 smackdown at the hands of the Colts. This one can’t go any worse, can it?