Jets playing better, harder than Giants
All season long we have heard constantly about how hard the Giants play, how hard they try, how much they fight. We kept hearing that when they scored six points in one game and seven in another and now have scored 26 points in their last three. You know who fights harder than they do right now? The Jets do. You know who area better team right now than the Giants are? The team with whom the Giants share Met Life Stadium.
The Jets were better than nobody for the first 13 games of this season. They were 0-13 and they were going to become the third team in history to go 0-16 and they were going to be worse than Rich Kotite’s 1-15 Jets, previously the worst team in Jets history, and they were going to draft Trevor Lawrence with the No. 1 pick in the next NFL draft and he was finally going to be the next Namath.
Andthen they went to Los Angeles last Sunday and beat a nine-win Rams team that came into that game looking like a hot team with Super Bowl aspirations out of the NFC. Now the Jets get another game, this time off a 10-win Browns team without all of its good wide receivers because of COVID-19. But this was pretty much the same Browns defense that gave the Giants just six points last
Sunday night, in the same stadium. The Jets beat them 23-16 and you know something? They might be favored to beat Bill Belichick’s Patriots in the first game of 2021 and last game of the regular season, and finish 3-13.
The Jets play hard. The Jets have somehow found this fight at the end of what looked for all the world like the worst team in the history of the franchise, on its way to being one of the worst teams of all time. We hear constantly about how the Giants don’t quit on Joe Judge, who is apparently coaching the bravest and most intrepid 5-10 team in the history of the league. Well, the Jets had every chance to quit on Adam Gase going into Los Angeles last Sunday. And did not.
And you know how close they are to having a third win already, against the Raiders, before that nightmare ending because of the genius who used to coach their defense. The Giants? When they upset the Seahawks a couple of weeks ago, it was their first victory over a team with a winning record in two years. You tell me whether you’d pick the Giants over the Jets right now if the two teams played for the championship of MetLife.
Of course Baker Mayfield didn’t have his wideouts on this day, and you saw what his offense looked like without those guys. But it absolutely does not change the way the Jets got after him, chasing him out of the pocket and knocking the ball out of his hands all the way to the play that finally won the Jets this game, a fourth-and-1 in the last two minutes when Tarell Basham once more punched the ball out of Mayfield’s hands on a quarterback sneak. Then, for the second Sunday in a row, the team that had looked like the biggest losers around where in the victory formation at the end of a game.
“Well,” my buddy Pete the Jets Fan said in a text at the end of the game, “Gase does have his team playing its best football heading into January again.”
It doesn’t change what we saw, starting all the way back in September. There are more Jets fans than not who still think the Jets in the past two weeks have blown a chance to get a generational player in Lawrence, whois probably on his way to another college football national championship at Clemson. Think about it: If Lawrence wins another one at Clemson in a couple of weeks, he’ll have won more titles in three years than the Jets have won in half-a-century.
“You look back and say what if we did this, this and this different,” Gase said after the game, when asked where this kind of Jets football has been all year.
When he was asked about the current Jets quarterback, Sam Darnold, Gase said, “He did enough for us to win. And he didn’t give the ball away.”
Darnold nearly threw some interceptions on Sunday; oh boy, did he ever. But he ended up with two touchdown passes and no picks and 175 passing yards, even though the best ball any Jet threw on this day was the touchdown pass Jamison Crowder threw deep downthe right side to Braxton Berrios.
“As a head coach, this year could have been even harder than what it’s been,” Gase said in his postgame interview.
The Jets could have won bigger against the Browns. It seemed the score stayed at 20-3 for about an hour when the Jets could have gone to 27-3, really could have put it on a Browns team that came into Jersey still thinking it would win the AFC North. And when the game was on the line, and they were likely looking at overtime, they got after Mayfield again. The Jets got another game.
There were some rumors that if the Jets went to 1-14 on Sunday that Gase might have been fired. Instead they beat a 10-win team after beating a nine-win team. Won’t save him. But right now his team is trying hard and fighting hard and winning football games. The Giants might not win another game until next season. The Jets weren’t better than anybody for 13 games. But right now the best New York football team is them.