Gang Green Nation
I hate to say it, but I wanted to see the Jets lose in Week 18 to the Buffalo Bills.
It was only partially dude to positioning in the NFL Draft. Of course, as a result of the 35-8 loss combined with the Giants’ win over the Cowboys, the Jets did clinch the number two overall pick in the 2026 NFL Draft. A win would have dropped the Jets by a couple of slots.
There was more to it, though. Over the years I’ve seen the Jets sell false hope over and over based on meaningless late season wins.
The Jets used a couple of narrow wins over bad opponents in 2019 to validate their decision to give Adam Gase a second season. In 2023 pulling out fourth quarter victories over bottom three opponents Washington and New England allowed the Jets to pound their chests over winning 7 games without Aaron Rodgers.
At the start of the season, I felt that how the Jets finished the season would likely be more important than how they started. This was a young roster full of players who were likely to struggle at the start of the year. Perhaps these game reps that resulted in early struggles would produce results in December.
Of course we saw how the season played out. The Jets traded two of their three stars at the deadline. The third spent the second half of the season on the sidelines injured. There were other injuries to key players. By this game, the Jets weren’t fielding an NFL caliber roster.
Still, I find the way the Jets finished the season difficult to defend. The personnel situation was ugly. You couldn’t expect many wins. In fact, you would expect the team to get blown out a fair share. All of this should be acknowledged.
At the same time the Jets weren’t the first team in history to have a thin roster decimated by injury. There are other teams pressed to putting practice squaders on the field in late season games.
Yet the Jets made history through their thorough lack of competitiveness.
I don’t care who you are. There’s no excuse to get annihilated like this week after week after week. There was never a ray of light anywhere in the last month of the season.
The roster might have been dismal, but the Bills played their backups in this game. Are we to accept that losing by 27 points to Buffalo’s B team is the best the Jets could do? Is it all right that the Jets made Mitchell Trubisky look like Josh Allen?
I know the cynics will say that the Jets were subtly executing a tank.
It doesn’t say good things about a team when people assume you were tanking because it isn’t possible to be that bad organically.
I have to question the premise as well. After all, the Jets wouldn’t have needed to tank so glaringly in order to lose games. There are also some pretty clear...
