Jets and Giants can look across the turf at MetLife Stadium this week for hope for the future
Houston Texans quarterback C.J. Stroud. Credit: AP
Now that baseball season is officially over, we partake in the annual tradition of fixing our gaze fully on the local football scene.
Blech.
As usual.
The Giants and Jets are about halfway through yet another campaign to nowhere. Since the Giants won the Super Bowl in February 2012 – the last of the championships for any of New York’s franchises in the traditional four major pro sports, with obvious hat tips to the Liberty and NYCFC – the two metropolitan NFL teams have played a combined 24 seasons during which they have combined for two postseason appearances and one playoff victory, all from the Giants. Within a few short months it appears they will tack another two seasons on to that streak of futility. This has been an era of exceptional failures for the two MetLife Stadium tenants, both of whom are playing host to games during the current Week 9 of this season.
While the Jets and Giants may be gruesome to look at and offer little in the way of positivity or inspiration, the two teams they face do offer a glimmer of hope for them.
The Jets play the Texans on Thursday night and the Giants will take on the Commanders on Sunday. Both of the opponents, unlike our New York reps, are seemingly poised for playoff runs this season. They both demonstrate just how quickly a franchise can turn itself around with some shrewd decision-making, by adding the right people in key spots, and a little bit of luck.
It wasn’t long ago that both Houston and Washington were afterthoughts. In the last two drafts they each were stuck with the second overall pick, meaning that the season before, they were the second-worst team in the league. Now they are each sitting in first place in their divisions.
The obvious key was the selection of their quarterbacks, which both teams appear to have nailed despite not getting dibs on the first pick. The Texans landed C.J. Stroud after the Panthers took Bryce Young in what may go down as one of the great miscalculations of the decade. That plus several other roster additions and the hiring of DeMeco Ryans as a young first-time head coach sparked them to a playoff appearance in 2023. They’ve since fortified their roster for a deeper postseason run this year and while injuries are mounting – Houston will be without wide receivers Stefon Diggs and Nico Collins on Thursday night and running back Joe Mixon has missed time already – and deficiencies in the offensive line are at times glaring, the team keeps winning. They enter Thursday’s game at 6-2 having won four of their last five games.
Washington, meanwhile, seems to be where Houston was last year. They got second choice in the great quarterback raffle of 2024 and selected Jayden Daniels (the quarterback, by the way, that the Giants made clear they truly coveted during their appearance on “Hard Knocks” this summer). He has helped transform the team from perennial losers to immediate title contenders. The Commanders also hired a new head coach in Dan Quinn (once a top candidate for the Jets job) who has infused the program with positivity and know-how. Having competent ownership has helped, too. Magic Johnson has won NBA titles as a player, just won a World Series ring as part-owner of the Dodgers, and could be hoisting a Lombardi Trophy in the near future as part of the ownership group of the Commanders. He may have to change his name from Magic to Midas.
Maybe the Giants and Jets should just sell a percentage of their franchise to him!
It’s about as good a plan as any they currently seem to have.
The Aaron Rodgers Experiment for the Jets has been a complete disaster and there is little evidence that either he or the team will want to prolong it beyond this season. The Jets almost certainly will have a new head coach and a new general manager for 2025 to go with what may by necessity be a new quarterback and they’ll find themselves essentially starting over.
The Giants, meanwhile, cannot continue beyond this year with the madness that is Daniel Jones as their quarterback. While John Mara said last week that he doesn’t anticipate making changes to the team’s leadership with Joe Schoen as general manager and Brian Daboll as head coach, there will be plenty of change elsewhere in an organization that has started a season at 2-6 or worse for the seventh time in the last eight years. The 2025 season will be the regime's fourth since arriving from Buffalo, but it basically will be another do-over for them as they wipe the whiteboard clean and begin anew.
None of it is ideal. None of it evokes confidence. And certainly none of it lends itself to pleasant Sunday viewing these next few months.
But as this week’s opponents illustrate, the direction of any organization can be altered very quickly in today’s NFL. That the Texans and Commanders did so while being mostly overshadowed and at times questioned during the critical moments when they made their fateful decisions also demonstrates that such maneuvers don’t have to be blockbusters at the time they are enacted to become game-changers once they are put into practice.
So grit your teeth through the rest of this football season. Hope for the best but don’t be shocked by the worst. Maybe change the channel to some basketball or hockey from time to time. Then buckle up for what could be a trajectory-shifting offseason from both the Giants and the Jets.
It’ll start right around the time the Yankees and Mets report for spring training.
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.