Gang Green Nation
It’s no longer “Super Bowl or Bust”
The last two years it has been difficult to define success or failure for the New York Jets. The team entered the 2023 and 2024 seasons in “Super Bowl or bust” mode. The Jets gave up a lot to land Aaron Rodgers for a short window, borrowed resources from the future to try and improve in the present, and loaded up on big name veterans for a Super Bowl push. Obviously, none of that worked out very well.
This year things are a bit different. The Jets have gotten younger. They have a first year head coach and first year general manager. The team had a quiet offseason in no small part because of the constraints all of the moves of the last two years placed on the team.
You won’t find many people saying the Super Bowl is a realistic goal for the 2025 Jets. That, of course, doesn’t mean the team should get a free pass no matter what.
So let’s think about what success means for the 2025 Jets.
Of course the NFL is a results-oriented business. No team could ever post a record like 3-14 and call a season a success. So what are results that could leave us feeling good about the team?
It depends on how ambitious you want to be. I will offer you three options.
Low Bar: Beat the spread
Our partners at FanDuel opened with a 5.5 win over/under for the Jets in 2025. This is a pretty logical place to start when we discuss what expectations should be for the team.
5.5 wins is a pretty low bar to reach. However, going over means the Jets will have improved upon their 2024 record.
It also seems worth noting how rarely the Jets have beaten preseason expectations. I searched as far back as I could for the team’s preseason FanDuel over/under in past seasons. I was able to get all the way to 2018. Compare the starting over/under with the actual win total.
In the last seven years, the Jets have only beaten the spread twice. Those two years were 2019 and 2022.
I would argue that 2019 deserves an asterisk. That season the Jets won their final game of the season, which took them from 6 (under) to 7 (over). That was a game against the Buffalo Bills, a team that had clinched its Playoff seeding and benched its starters in the first half.
If we have the belief that the most important part of this season is the new head coach and GM showing they are competent, beating the preseason win total would be a nice first step. It would also be a rarity by recent Jets standards.
Medium Bar: Be Alive in Week 17
One of the enduring themes of this era of Jets football is how uncompetitive the team has been. The Jets almost always been bad in recent years. Beyond that, they haven’t even come close to...
