Misery and gloom are haunting the Giants yet again this football season. But there is one consolation: At least they aren’t the Jets.
It is not even Thanksgiving, and it already feels like football season is over in New York. Neither team has been mathematically eliminated from the playoffs yet, but the Jets are 3-8 and the Giants are 2-8.
Jets and Giants fans who had reserved Sunday afternoons for football are now free to head to brunch.
For the Giants, who won only six games last year, the awful season is not completely unexpected. But Jets fans had high hopes this year. With a talented roster and a healthy future Hall of Fame quarterback, the team went into the season with the 10th-best odds of winning the Super Bowl.
But the Jets have long put the “NY” in agony.
“I’m talking about the most beleaguered fan base in professional sports today, and it’s not even close,” said Joe Benigno, the longtime WFAN radio host and even longer suffering Jets fan. “It’s not debatable anymore.”
Benigno, 71, has been a devoted fan since 1965, when the Jets acquired Joe Namath out of Alabama and won the Super Bowl only four seasons later. But whatever magic they had soon morphed into a half century of torment under a bizarre affliction of incompetence and dysfunction that Benigno sums up as “laughingstock-itis.”
Benigno is an expert on all things Jets. The fake spike, the butt fumble, numerous other awful moments — he’s seen them all. But he believes that lifetime of devotion adds up a little differently.
“I’m not an expert on anything except aggravation,” he said.
This year’s unqualified disaster will almost certainly end up as the Jets’ 56th consecutive season without a Super Bowl appearance. They have not had a winning season since 2015 and have missed the playoffs since 2010, the longest streak of futility in the four major American sports.
But last year, Aaron Rodgers came to the Jets from the Green Bay Packers, with whom he had won a Super Bowl and four Most Valuable Player Awards (as recently as 2020 and 2021). An otherwise-loaded roster finally had a quarterback to match. Hope was boundless.
Then came what was perhaps the most Jetsy debut of all time: On his fourth play of his first game, Rodgers tore an Achilles’ tendon and missed virtually the entire season. Incredibly, this year feels even worse.
Rodgers’s play has been mostly adequate, if unspectacular. That is not surprising, since he will turn 42 on Dec. 2 and is coming off a major leg injury. But his eccentric off-field persona and apparent embrace of conspiracy theories would be easier for fans to ignore at 8-3, rather than 3-8.
He has also seemed at times to be running the organization, not just the huddle. When Rodgers appeared to shove Robert Saleh, then the team’s head coach, on the sideline during a game, it seemed almost inevitable that Saleh would be fired. Two weeks later, he was. (Firing Saleh did not help, so last week the Jets fired Joe Douglas, the general manager.)
“He’s a different bird,” Jeff Lageman, the Jets defensive star from 1989 to 1994, said about Rodgers. “I had a feeling this year might not go very well, and now it’s like I’m a NASCAR fan waiting to see the wreck.”
Lageman is now an analyst for the Jacksonville Jaguars on radio and television, but he still watches and roots for the Jets, he said, because he knows how long their fans have suffered. He loved playing in New York, but losing there, “ain’t fun,” he said.
“When we stunk, we’d get beat up, laughed at and made fun of,” he said, “then after a while they just forget about you because they are all into the Knicks or the Islanders or Rangers, or whatever. When you win in New York, it’s like a magic carpet ride. When you lose, it stinks.”
Lageman said that when losing becomes endemic, the problem usually lies at the top, with ownership. Many fans see Woody Johnson, who purchased the team in 2000, as a meddling incompetent, but Benigno thinks he has just been listening to the wrong people. That is why he proposes that the Jets rehire Rex Ryan, the charismatic TV analyst who coached the team to their last two conference title games in 2009 and 2010.
“This is a low, low ebb for this franchise,” Benigno said. “It’s all about the coach. They can’t miss this time.”
The Giants did not come into the season with the same high hopes, but like the Jets, they have a very murky future at quarterback. Unlike Rodgers, Daniel Jones, the quarterback whom the Giants signed to a four-year, $160 million contract two years ago, projects the sort of square-jawed blandness for which the position is often known. But also unlike Rodgers, he has never been great.
The Giants have the lowest points-per-game average (15.6) in the N.F.L. and Jones was benched ahead of Sunday’s game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and then released — at his request — on Friday. New Jersey’s own Tommy DeVito was named the starter.
DeVito, who starred at Don Bosco Prep in Ramsey, N.J., became a brief sensation last year by winning three straight games and revealing his love of jersey-style chicken cutlets. Tommy Cutlets, as he came to be known, was eventually benched, too, and it is not clear why he was elevated from third string to starter again, leapfrogging the backup quarterback.
“It’s confusing on so many levels,” said David Meister, a longtime fan and the author of Jintz Jotz, a Giants-themed newsletter. “If it’s to satisfy the fans, that’s not going to go very far.”
Meister, a sports television executive, has had at least a share of Giants season tickets since 1961, including the years they played at Yankee Stadium and the Yale Bowl in New Haven, Conn. He can delve into the specifics of every position group on every Giants squad since then, and believes the team was even worse in the 1970s.
He still trudges out to the occasional game at MetLife Stadium, home of both the Jets and the Giants, but finds the “horror” of getting there from Manhattan and back exhausting.
“The stadium is charmless, devoid of personality,” he said. “It’s gray cinder block. You couldn’t plaster the thing? Hide the plumbing? It’s an insult. And if the team is bad, it’s just not a nice way of spending a Sunday afternoon in the fall.”
Brunch seems like a nice alternative.
The post Have New York’s Football Teams Finally Hit Rock Bottom? appeared first on New York Times.
