Garrett Wilson is at a loss to understand why Jets lose the way they do
Garrett Wilson of the Jets is tackled in the first quarter of a game against the Miami Dolphins at Hard Rock Stadium on Sunday in Miami Gardens, Fla. Credit: Getty Images/Carmen Mandato
MIAMI GARDENS, Fla.
Garrett Wilson stood on the sideline for most of the final 4 1⁄2 minutes of action on Sunday with nothing to do but watch and cringe.
The wide receiver had one of his top games of the season, as did the entire Jets offense, and it was enough to give the team a lead with less than a minute left in regulation. But they ran just one play after that (a meaningless pass to run out the clock in the fourth quarter), and he knew what was coming.
Because it happened in each of the previous two games, too. And five times this season. And time and time again during his tenure here.
So he watched the Jets do what they seem to do best: Lose.
First they allowed a long kickoff return that led to the overtime-forcing field goal with seven seconds left in the fourth quarter. Then they lost the coin toss. Then they let the Dolphins drive 70 yards in eight plays to win the game, 32-26, on a 10-yard touchdown pass from Tua Tagovailoa to tight end Jonnu Smith.
“When you are up in the fourth quarter, all of a sudden, it starts to feel like you have a losing problem,” Wilson said. “It’s like you have a gene or some [expletive]. It’s not like we are going out there and getting our butt beat from start to finish. No, we have a chance to go win the game. We’re supposed to win the game. Odds are in our favor and we’re finding a way to lose the game. It’s just frustrating.”
The mindset of the team, he said, is fine. The attitude is good. The process during the week is spot-on. They just can’t win.
“At the end of the day,’’ he said, “we have to stop being losers.”
Maybe he is right. Maybe there is some kind of biological change that occurs when players put on those Jets uniforms and they mutate into beings incapable of performing as well as they are supposed to.
It’s not just this crop, either. This loss officially eliminated the Jets from postseason contention for the 14th straight season. That’s an unfathomable stretch of time without having reached the playoffs, more than half of the lifetime of many of the players who were part of this latest edition of sorrow and misery.
The last time the Jets were in the playoff was at the end of the 2010 season. That was Aaron Rodgers’ third year as a starting quarterback in the league and the season in which he won his only Super Bowl. He hadn’t even claimed any of his four MVPs at that point.
At least Rodgers was able to shrug off having a hand in most of that losing. “I’ve started one year,” he said. “I’m a part of it for one year.”
He did call it “disappointing.” Others used that word, too. Some went further. Interim coach Jeff Ulbrich called the ways that the Jets have been finding to lose not just this season but over this past month or so “maddening.” Tight end Tyler Conklin called it “frustrating as hell.”
That overused F-word — frustrating — was thrown around the Jets' locker room so often on Sunday that it even showed up in some incorrect spaces. One reporter tried to ask Davante Adams how hard it is to keep focused through the losing and accidentally asked how hard it is to stay frustrated. While the question was quickly corrected, Adams had a light moment with it.
“How do I stay frustrated? I was gonna say: That’s easy,” he said.
For many of those players and coaches this time with the Jets has been difficult . . . but not defining. They’ll move on, either by their choice or someone else’s, in the coming months. This team that was assembled to snap the playoff drought and failed epically will be dismantled and the veterans who have resumes that include winning will move along.
But that’s not as easy for Wilson. It’s never been easy for him since he got here as the 10th overall draft pick in 2022. He’s invested in this franchise the way the transients and passers-by are not. And it’s why he takes the losing harder than they do.
“I’m trying to figure it out, trying to play my part to make it switch, make it change,” he said. “One of my takeaways from this is we have to be ready for when the season comes. Winning the offseason is winning the offseason, winning training camp is winning training camp. Let’s win when it matters.”
He called last season the worst year of his life. He should have waited for that kind of declaration.
“I don’t feel good, man,” he said of his feelings about 2024. “I don’t feel good about it.”
Wilson was asked if he is surprised that this team, with so much promise, has deteriorated to this point — a 3-10 record, coming up short in four straight, losing nine of the last 10, having gotten the head coach and general manager fired, and so on and so forth.
He said yes, and that if anyone had told him that fate during training camp when they were humming along in practices and beating up joint practice victims, he would not have believed it.
“I would have been like ‘Yeah, you’re lying,’ ” he said. “ ‘Hell, no. We put it together.’ ”
But if he had been asked more recently? During the past few weeks? Maybe at any point since the season took its big downhill turn after Week 3, the last time the Jets had a winning record? That’s not a stunner.
“I ain’t that shocked,” he conceded.
No one should be. These are the Jets, predisposed to the anguishes and distresses they have conjured for themselves this season.
They are, as Wilson accurately called them, losers. And at this point, shedding that label is nowhere in sight.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.