Jet Expectations
Image courtesy of @aussiedave
I’m going to be brutally honest with you, and I’m also going to hope I never meet Aaron Rodgers (or Garrett Wilson, or my boy Sauce Gardner) in real life: the New York Jets are an embarrassment to sports and sometimes to mankind.
The franchise at least has one Super Bowl triumph in its history, but culturally has managed to seem less purposeful than the twelve teams to have never tasted glory. The Jets are chronically poor at drafting quarterbacks, and any glance backwards is cast towards a long line of triers who, at best, have proven themselves okay backups in the pros. In my life as a football fan, and a concussion denier, I’ve seen Chad Pennington make the sport look like manual, largely unrewarding labour — Brett Favre walk not-so-gently into the sunset — and Mark Sanchez fumble the ball off a teammate’s ass. The Jets, and this matters just as much as sports things, wear a depressing, dour shade of green, which I can’t help but associate with the infinite times they’ve botched games, seasons, draft picks. Seeing them bumble about on television reminds me too much of my romantic, literary, and existential failures, and thus links any thought of allegiance to embracing what pigeon shit the universe plants on my shoulder sometimes.
Worse, in the sport most populated by terrible owners, the Jets are owned by a man who took a brief break from running the team to be Donald Trump’s ambassador to the UK — a stint during which Mr. Woody Johnson is alleged to have habitually made racist and/or sexist remarks, and even poo-pooed the notion of Black History Month. Given the chance to walk back any of this, or to at least regret having worked for an oaf that more than once incited political violence, Johnson simply said he was glad to get back to running the Jets. Ah, the Jets — the football-running, high-drafting, change-of-planning Jets, who have now leveraged playing just outside the greatest city in the world to attract one of the finest quarterbacks of his generation.
Except, you know, Aaron Rodgers won’t be trying to out-pass his generation of quarterbacks, when he crosses paths with all of Pat Mahomes, Jalen Hurts, Justin Herbert, and Josh Allen (twice). The King of the NFC North was finally hustled off his throne by a stubborn or inept or self-destructive front office in Green Bay, and by falsely ascendant turns from the Lions and Vikings, and then thrust into the lights and action of what the Jets do win with all their noise: the offseason.
With nothing but pure theory, pundits have already sent the Jets, first class, to the 2024 Super Bowl — as though every AFC team in their way hasn’t spent three years or more synchronising their motions, and as though Taylor Swift has in fact said, “Baby, yes” to crushing the half-time show. To his credit, Rodgers seems bemused by it all. He has been gifted a chain by the defensive rookie of the year, gifted the New York dailies clicks by coming out as a casual Swiftie, and everyone has gone out of their way (on HBO’s declining Hard Knocks series) to tell us what an amazing person he is. (He’s even grown himself a cheeky little handlebar moustache, the surest sign yet of a vibes-first existence.) The Jets swear they didn’t want the publicity of Hard Knocks, in a summer they’ve spent saying well fuck yeah to every camera in sight, courting damn near every available free agent, and despite three episodes now of awfully performative soundbites. They’ll be easy to laugh at, one imagines, if they have signed the wrong Aaron Rodgers, or if that much-maligned offensive line fails to protect him from everyone else’s blitz. They’ll be right back where they started from, one fears, if anything happens to Rodgers without fresh, unjaundiced talent at the quarterback position, or a plan for it once this giddy sideshow is over.
I wish the Jets were more like the crosstown Giants in more than one conceivable way. I wish they were quieter about their off-field business, a little less New York about it actually, and I wish they conducted less off-field business period; especially in the PR department. But here I am — just a boy with a broken version of NFL Game Pass, looking to enjoy some touchdowns and make sure by the time I’m 50 that I’ve given the rest of my adulthood (totally) to New York-based sporting endeavours.
Maybe I’ve spent a long time drawing the wrong parallels between my various sports clubs. Maybe it’s not the big multicultural cities or the multimedia centres or the years of underwhelming output they all have in common. It’s the problematic owners, litty social media feeds, and entire futures resting on such young, mostly unsuspecting shoulders.
Go (gulp) Jets (yikes) Jets (sigh) Jets.
