SHOOTING FROM THE LIP
Good QB play would really cool jets around Gang Green circus
IT WAS a good week to bang away at the Jets again — are you kidding? — even as they are starting all over again. A linebacker punches the starting quarterback, Geno Smith, and not only breaks Smith’s jaw but punches his ticket to Buffalo at the same time. And one more bad thing for the Jets, who occasionally seem to lead the league in bad things, evokes memories of a lot of others, and we’re taking a trip down memory lane.
IK Enemkpali does what he does and immediately becomes a part of Jets lore forever, not so long after a dim bulb named Sheldon Richardson gets caught driving 143 miles an hour with a child and a fully loaded semi-automatic weapon in his car and, according to the police report, stinking of weed. Of course this was before Richardson officially started his four-game suspension over a positive drug test, reportedly for weed. As always, they don’t call it dope for nothing.
So the Jets are a rim shot all over again, even with Rex Ryan out of town and Mark Sanchez out of town and Tim Tebow wherever he is. So the Jets are about to start a new season under a new regime with a new quarterback, Ryan Fitzpatrick, one about to set some kind of world’s record for starting games for different teams in the National Football League.
It means that the Jets’ real problem isn’t as much locker-room fistfights and defensive linemen acting dumber than a bag of hammers, or old stories about tattoos or foot fetishes or quarterbacks getting injured in the fourth quarter of preseason games or butt fumbles. Any of that. It is that they still don’t have a star quarterback in a quarterback league. With a couple of exceptions, which means a couple of big seasons from Vinny Testaverde and Chad Pennington, the Jets haven’t had a star quarterback since Joe Namath.
And even though Namath is one of the iconic figures in the history of sports in New York and in the NFL, even if his guarantee for Super Bowl III will always make him look and seem like the Ali of Jets history from now until the end of time, you don’t want to take too close a look at Joe’s resume, either.
Maybe Todd Bowles, the new coach, can figure things out this season with some combination of Fitzpatrick and Smith and the defense he has, and the Jets can make some kind of run in the AFC East. Maybe when it is all over, despite the way the preseason begins for the Jets, they can be a better football team than the Giants by January.
But for now, when you add things up at MetLife Stadium, you know the real difference between the two teams? The Giants have Eli and the Jets don’t have anybody close. Ask yourself a question: If Eli is a Jet instead of a Giant right now, are people picking the Patriots to win the AFC East, or are they picking the New York Jets? No joke.
The irony of Rex’s situation in Buffalo is that he is no better off there than he was with the Jets, because he doesn’t have a quarterback there, either.
You look back at all the years since Namath, and you see Richard Todd and Matt Robinson and Ken O’Brien (and you better take a look at O’Brien’s best seasons, because the Jets would sure take them right now). The best season of all for them, in all the seasons since Namath won the Jets the only Super Bowl in which they have ever played, was produced by Vinny (From Elmont) Testaverde back in 1998, when Vinny was as much an MVP as anybody in the league, throwing 29 touchdown passes against seven interceptions and taking Bill Parcells’ Jets, really, to within one good half in Denver of going to the Super Bowl.
Then came Pennington, and those two years when the Jets got just enough out of Sanchez to make it to two AFC Championship Games in a row. Now this. Now Geno. And Fitzpatrick, the Harvard guy. And the hope, or maybe the prayer, that Bryce Petty can someday be the same kind of quarterback in the pros that he was at Baylor. The Giants? The Giants still have No. 10. “We always know we have a chance to win with him under center. It was the same way with No. 11 (Phil Simms, of course). I’m not sure what more you can ask for from your QB,” John Mara said Friday.
A couple of years ago Mara put it this way, “The head coach and No. 10 give us a chance every week.”
Now that does not get the Giants into the playoffs the last couple of years. And as well as No. 10 played for most of last season, the Giants still finished 6-10. For the smiley face that Odell Beckham Jr. put on the season, the Giants weren’t all that much better, in the whole grand scheme of things, than the Jets. But when they did have a chance to win it all, No. 10 made plays and made throws and the Giants did win it all. The Jets, with the kid Sanchez at quarterback, didn’t make it past those two championship games, or back to the big game.
Again: Even with the one-sided heavyweight bout between Enemkpali and Geno, even with Richardson acting criminally stupid in that car, even with all the bad memories these incidents brought flooding back for Jets fans, tell me how those fans feel about the upcoming season if Eli is playing for them.
We can have a lot of fun about how starcrossed this franchise has been, for so much of the last four decades, certainly since Namath owned New York the way he did. The Jets have brought so much of this on themselves. But the real reason they’ve been star-crossed is because they’ve only ever had one real star at quarterback. And even he wasn’t a star for very long.