Jets fans suffer through another playoff season on sidelines
NEW YORK — There really is no better weekend in the pro football season than this one, two games on Saturday, including the one between the Giants and the Eagles, and two more on Sunday, including the one between the Cowboys and the 49ers, one of the storied rivalries in the history of the sport.
But there is no season for Jets fans at this time of year.
There hasn’t been any playoff season for Jets fans in 12 long years, practically 12 years to the day from when Rex Ryan’s guys nearly chased the Steelers into the parking lot at Heinz Field before finally losing that AFC Championship, 24-19.
Every sports team in town, and on either side of the Hudson, has made the postseason since then. Except for the Jets. Everybody on either side of the Hudson has a winning record right now, except for the Jets, who went from 7-4 this time to 7-10, dropping like a rock over the last six weeks of the season.
For now, and for all the bright promise shown over the first 11 weeks, especially by the defense, the Jets remain the biggest losers we have in sports around here, their fans having the same kind of conversation or listening to the same conversation that always seems to go on around them, about who is going to be their quarterback next season.
You know the only quarterback who has given them a chance to make the postseason since Heinz Field? Ryan Fitzpatrick. He was 33 in 2015, playing for his sixth NFL team (there would be three more for him after that), and the Jets were 10-5 going into Buffalo on the last Sunday of the regular season. If they won they were back in the playoffs. They lost to the Bills that day. Because this is the Jets, of course the Bills were being coached by Rex, who really did coach that game as if it was the Super Bowl he never made when he had the Jets.
It looked as if they were going to make it back to the playoffs this time.
There would be the point when Zach Wilson, on whom the Jets appear to have swung and missed at No. 2 in the draft the way they swung and missed with Sam Darnold at No. 3, had a record of 5-2 as a starter. The two losses were against Bill Belichick, who has made a coaching career stealing lunch money from young quarterbacks like the kid from Brigham Young.
At the bitter end for the Jets, just because they’re the Jets, they went with Joe Flacco in the last game of their regular season rather than Wilson. It was a way of raising a white flag, and not in honor of Mike White, by the way.
Now, once again, they are on the outside looking in. The following thoughts come from a friend of mine who is the best and most sensible Jets fan I know, and the one who told me from the start, when we first started hearing that GM Joe Douglas had fallen in love with Wilson, that drafting him was a mistake:
“You watch games this weekend as a Jets fan and feel as if your team isn’t even in the league anymore, like they’re playing in somebody else’s
NFL, just not this one. We talk frequently about the Jets owning the longest playoff drought in the NFL — now 12 seasons — but that’s not the only blight on the franchise. Since the Jets fell five points shy of a trip to the Super Bowl that January 2011 night at Heinz Field, they are one of only just six NFL franchises NOT to make the Divisional Round. The other five — the Dolphins, Raiders, Commanders, Bears and Lions. Please excuse us Jets fans for not turning cartwheels over keeping that kind of company.”
He is right, painfully right, about all of this.
Jets fans have watched the Bengals come from nowhere to games like these. They have watched the Bills come from nowhere to games like these. They have watched the Chiefs draft a generational quarterback like Patrick Mahomes with a pick — the 10th — a lot lower than the ones the
Jets used on Darnold and Wilson.
These are the Jets, and even when they show the kind of promise they did across the first two-thirds of the season, you see how it ends. My friend is right. It’s more than them not being in the playoffs. It really does feel at this time of year as if the Jets aren’t even in the league.