NFL prime-time games means your football team is good. Usually.
New York Jets' Breece Hall, center, reacts after scoring a touchdown during the second half against the Philadelphia Eagles. Credit: AP/Adam Hunger
It did not take long for the NFL’s late afternoon and prime time television game plan for our local teams to go horribly awry.
Remember opening weekend? On Sunday night, Sept. 10, the Giants lost to the Cowboys, 40-0, portending what has become a disastrous season.
On Monday night, the Jets lost quarterback Aaron Rodgers four offensive plays into their game against the Bills, turning them into a far less attractive media draw.
Hey, stuff happens.
The Giants have reverted to being what should be a Sunday at 1 o’clock team, no matter what their schedule says, pending whatever flexing magic the NFL works.
This Sunday’s 4:25 p.m. visit to the Cowboys, a national TV showcase slot, does not figure to be competitive.
At least the Jets were able to look forward to Monday night’s home game against the Chargers — and beyond — with something to play for, no matter the result.
At 4-3 and with a three-game winning streak, and after everyone else in the AFC East lost on Sunday, the Jets have partly justified their time slots, Rodgers or not.
After Monday night’s game at MetLife Stadium, they have another of their five prime-time games set for Sunday night in Las Vegas against the Raiders.
That will be followed a couple of weeks later by a game that is not technically in prime time but will offer an even bigger stage when they host the inaugural Black Friday game against the Miami Dolphins.
Wacky, inconsistent, sleep-disrupting schedules are the price teams pay for being good, at least on paper. But there is no point in complaining about it.
As the NFL always says, if you are a fan (or coach, or player) who likes 1 p.m. games on Sunday, then root for your team to be bad.
The Jets are not as good as they would have been with Rodgers, certainly, but they are interesting, with a compelling cast of characters and plenty of talent.
If dealing with the scheduling fallout of acquiring Rodgers in the offseason is part of chaotic practice planning, so be it.
Coach Robert Saleh, his staff and his players have no choice but to make the best of it. That does not make it easy.
“For sure, this year our schedule feels like it has been all over the place,” Saleh said before practice on Friday. “We have got four games in 19 days coming up over the next month [between Monday and Nov. 24]. Like today, I was laughing with ‘Scar’ [Steve Scarnecchia], our chief of staff, because today is Friday, but it is a Wednesday schedule with a Thursday practice. So there are all kinds of things going on.”
But Saleh chooses to look at it as a benefit, because looking at it as a negative would serve no one’s purpose.
“It is OK to continuously change the stimulations,” he said. “I think it is actually better than getting into the monotony of same old, same old.
“The times change, the schedule changes. It keeps you on your toes, keeps you alert, keeps you locked in. So there are positives to it.”
Saleh said on Friday that the Jets have their work schedule mapped out through the Dolphins game on Nov. 24. After that, things get more normal until a Thursday night game in Cleveland on Dec. 28 (pending flexing follies).
As for the players, they are professionals who do what they are instructed to do and do it as well as they can. But like many fans, most would just as soon not play under the lights and/or on unconventional days of the week.
Football players have the closest thing to 9-to-5 jobs in professional team sports, and thus are creatures of habit.
When Newsday asked Jets running back Breece Hall on Friday whether he enjoys playing prime-time games, he said this: “They’re cool.”
But . . .
“Me personally, I’d rather play at 1 and be able to just go home and chill after the game and not have to get two or three hours of sleep and be back [at work]. But it is what it is.”
Nothing is more challenging than road night games on the West Coast, which is what the Jets will have next weekend.
Again: Bad teams get heavy doses of 1 p.m. Sunday games, so be careful what you wish for. The Giants and Jets have had many of those over the past decade, often playing simultaneously in that time slot.
The worst-case scenario is a bad team with a challenging time schedule. The now 2-7 Giants played four of their first six games this season at night. Yuck.
As Hall said, “It is what it is.” But it is not what anyone thought it would be when the schedule came out in May, and the season began in September.
Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.
