DUB & BURIED
Disheartening defeat leaves Gang with little to play for
TAMPA, Fla. — There was a time, not so long ago, when an afternoon like this would have been summarily shrugged off, the simple cost of doing the nefarious business of self-sabotage. But the Jets left that part of the season behind them weeks ago. They won some games. They were competitive.
Sometimes, they even looked pretty damned good.
Which is why this stink bomb of a game, this 15-10 loss to the Buccaneers, leaves such a sour taste, one that will linger thanks to an impending bye week and the fact that, for better or worse, it was the Jets that harbored the ambitions — however illusory — of an entire football city. At least before this.
“We played hard,” Jets coach Todd Bowles said. “We didn’t play smart.”
More to the point, they didn’t play well at a time in their season when playing well would have fortified them for two full weeks, would have dragged their record back to .500, would have kept their season on a track in which at least talking about the postseason wasn’t a hysterical hallucination.
Instead, facing a Bucs team that had lost five straight, that was missing its starting quarterback and its top receiver, and was throwing old friend Ryan Fitzpatrick into the fray, the Jets played a low-energy, lowexecution, high-frustration game in which they did nothing well.
The Bucs came in having collected exactly eight sacks on the year; they picked up six against a Jets offensive line that looked like it was playing 4-on-7 most of the day. The Bucs were 26th in total defense, 30th against the pass, and the Jets presented the most rudimentary and unimaginative offense possible, kept blindly running into eight-man fronts, and only waited until it was too late to open the passing game.
“We never got our rhythm going as we usually do,” wide receiver Robby Anderson said. “It’s frustrating. We’ve got to do better.”
Said linebacker Jordan Jenkins: “There were a couple of plays to be made today in every phase, offense, defense, special teams. And they made the play every time.”
And that’s what’s so inexcusable. Look, the games the Jets blew against the Dolphins and Falcons were painful to reconcile, but they were also bad endings to games in which the Jets had generally played quite well. The Raiders loss turned on a muffed punt that otherwise obscured a wellplayed half at a time when the team was still trying to find itself.
But this? This was inexcusable. This was unpardonable. This was a room-temperature effort with actual stakes attached, and it was a teamwide virus. Quarterback Josh McCown wasn’t given much of a game plan to use, and he made the least of whatever opportunities he was given to make plays. The defense played OK much of the day, but on the key drive of the fourth quarter kept committing stupid penalties.
And the coaches, who have done such a terrific job most of the year coaxing the Jets into believing they’re better than they are, were unable to adjust on the fly, after seeing right from the jump that the team had reported for work flat and ineffective.
“We didn’t show up today,” Bowles said, and there really is no harsher indictment than that.
And now there is, speaking frankly and bleakly, officially nothing for any local football fan to show up for the rest of the way. The Giants are a lost cause. And the Jets, who teased everyone in going 3-2 in the season’s first five games, who hinted that they were perhaps honestly for real while ransacking the Bills on national TV a week and a half ago, are staggering toward Palookaville.
Maybe they’ve already given far more than they should’ve been expected to give. But that seems like it’s letting them too easily off the hook. They demanded to be judged to a higher standard than tanking tomato cans, then played well enough to earn that scrutiny.
And then they walked into the haze of Raymond James Stadium, took a good look at the possibility of prosperity, and said, “No, thanks.”
“We lost a unanimous decision in a 12-round fight,” Bowles said, but he got his boxing metaphor all wrong. The Bucs challenged his team to put up its dukes, and the Jets responded, meek as a mouse, “No mas.”