A long time coming for a Sept. win
Jets badly need victory in season’s first month
POP QUIZ: When is the last time the Jets won a game in September? No, wise guy, it was not 1968. But it has been a while. The Jets’ last win in September came on Sept. 10, 2018 in Detroit. You remember that game, right? It was a big debut for Sam Darnold. The Jets got touchdowns from the defense and special teams in a 48-17 romp that ended with fans crowded behind the bench doing the J-E-T-S chant. People believed the franchise quarterback had been found and the team was on its way.
Since then, the Jets are 0-9 in the month of September. To say the Jets have been bad in the NFL’s opening month is like saying it drizzled here on Wednesday night.
The Jets have been awful at the start of the season, losing six of those games by 10 points or more and failing to score more than 17 points in any of the losses. They have been outscored 236-111 in the nine games.
This is the challenge awaiting new head coach Robert Saleh and the 2021 version of the Jets. Can they get win one of these September games: at Carolina, vs. New England, at Denver? A victory would go a long way for Saleh as he tries to establish his program and forge an identity for a young team.
Saleh has done a good job with his messaging and his teaching. You can tell his players believe in him and are buying in. But at some point, the players are going to need results to reinforce the message and really give Saleh the credibility in the locker room he needs for long-term success.
Saleh agreed with the premise that wins build confidence, but he said it won’t matter if it happens early or late.
“Confidence is contagious right?” Saleh said. “But I think it applies to even a veteran, when you have initial success, and you get that confidence, it gets contagious, right? You see it all the time, the teams that won the last three or four games at the end of the regular season are hot and they ride that momentum, like Tampa [Bay] did last year. No one at midseason would have thought they were going to win a Super Bowl. You just get hot, and you roll. It’s the same thing, that confidence starts to build, you think you’re invincible.”
But the Jets are trying to change a losing culture, and an early win would boost that. A veteran player who had been with a winning team before joining the Jets told me a few years ago that there was a dread inside the Jets’ locker room that when things went poorly, everyone felt, “Here we go again.”
The Jets are rebuilding and could get off to a rough start. They probably won’t be favored in a game until Oct. 31, when the Bengals visit MetLife Stadium. They started 0-13 last year and opened 1-7 in 2019. Another slow start looks probable due to their first six games.
Saleh argued that the Jets do not necessarily need a fast start. He pointed to 2017, when the 49ers started 0-9 and then went 6-1 down the stretch. That team, for which Saleh was defensive coordinator, traded for quarterback
Jimmy Garoppolo at midseason, though.
“We started 0-9, lost seven games by three points or less, or something like that,” Saleh said. “We won our last five games of the year. How does that happen? You win one, Jimmy Garoppolo steps in and then you get confidence and everyone’s excited and then you overwhelm people with juice. It’s the same thing, whether you’re a veteran team or a young team, success breeds confidence, confidence breeds more success.”
Confidence is something that has been lacking around here for a while. An early win, maybe over Darnold himself, would go a long way for these young Jets.