Why the Jets Never Got Off the Ground
WHY THE JETS NEVER GOT OFF THE GROUND – I made a really poor prediction at the start of the college football season. I picked Florida State to win the ACC Championship.
As you can see from the link below, that’s going to go down as one of my worst predictions ever, given that the Seminoles are 1-7 and ineligible for a bowl game.
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But I made a really smart prediction at the start of the NFL season: This wasn’t going to work out for Aaron Rodgers and the Jets in New York.
And the Jets haven’t been much better than the Seminoles, going 2-6 in their first eight games. With Houston, Arizona, Indianapolis and Seattle up next, there’s a real chance the Jets won’t be favored in any of those games. They’re four games back of Buffalo for the AFC East, and the Bills still get to play them again in Orchard Park and have three other division games.
Translation: It’s over as far as winning the AFC East. It might well be over as far as making the playoffs goes as well. Here’s a look at why the Jets never got off the ground.
New York Bet Everything On Rodgers
The Jets went into last season thinking that all they needed was a replacement for Zach Wilson. And to be fair, that probably wasn’t far off. Two 7-10 seasons with a strong, young defense said that New York wasn’t far away. And Wilson, clearly, was not the answer.
But was Rodgers? At 39, Rodgers was still good enough to start, but he clearly wasn’t the same player he’d been a decade ago. And the Jets clearly weren’t as far along as they believed they were, at least not on offense. You can paper over some flaws with a great quarterback — hello, Tom Brady — but Rodgers’ play in Green Bay had regressed to merely decent.
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That doesn’t work, and it hasn’t worked this season. Father Time isn’t quite undefeated — hello again, Tom Brady — but his win percentage is .999, and Rodgers isn’t in that 0.001 of ageless athletes. At 41, he’s clearly showing some decline and needs some top-tier talent around him to win. And that’s not what exists in New York.
And the Jets aren’t going to create that, even as they bring in more of Rodgers’ old friends to try to make him happy. New York is what it is, and it’s not a good enough offense to win.
The Jets Have No Long-Term Plan
Bill Belichick nailed it when he broke down his resignation from the Jets: New York has been a mess under Woody Johnson. It’s now been 13 years since the Jets even played in the postseason. New York hasn’t won a division title since 2002 and MetLife Stadium has never seen a Jets playoff game.
And the Jets’ flurry of moves to try to fix this showed the problem: Johnson has no plan.
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He showed he had no plan by firing Robert Saleh, openly choosing his quarterback over his coach. But Saleh was simply not the problem in New York. He wasn’t the solution either, and he probably deserved to be on the hot seat for next season. However, he crafted a strong defense that kept the Jets in every game. And in replacing him with Jeff Ulbrich, his defensive coordinator, Johnson obviously hoped to keep the Jets’ defense strong while trying to jolt the offense.
Guess again. The Jets have instead collapsed on defense, proving that while Saleh might not be head coach material, he knows what he’s doing on defense. New York has now lost three straight under Ulbrich and given up at least 20 points in all of them. The Jets now have a struggling offense and a struggling defense, instead of a struggling offense and a strong defense. And that’s on Johnson.
Rodgers Didn’t Come Back Strong
There was only one way this was ever going to work: Rodgers shook off the Achilles injury and came back stronger than ever. And he didn’t do that. He didn’t bother to get on the same page with his teammates. He clearly wasn’t following the science when it came to taking care of his body. And he simply isn’t the same athlete he was at 31, or even 36, that he is at 41.
Rodgers looks slow and old in the pocket, and he’s not on the same page with his teammates. None of this is adding up for the Jets, and it’s honestly going the same way of the Brett Favre experiment. The good news for the Jets is the fallout of that experiment did produce two AFC championship trips under Rex Ryan, so maybe Johnson can make a good hire in 2025 and get somewhere with a young quarterback. But this season appears totally lost.
