Can Jets and Giants finally make MetLife Stadium a place to call home?
Excitement is returning to MetLife Stadium with the improved play of the Giants and Jets this season. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
It is the least-loved pro sports facility in the area — a soulless hulk sitting in a parking lot in New Jersey that was financed in part by dreaded personal seat licenses and designed by a two-team committee (and looks it).
Newsday’s Tom Rock offered the first, best and still-applicable assessment after a media tour before the place opened in the form of this April 8, 2010, tweet:
“Overall stadium impression: like a battleship — big, gray and expensive.”
Pretty much.
But as lacking as MetLife Stadium is in charm, its image would have been helped immensely over these past 13 seasons if it had received a little help from its marquee tenants.
Sure, there have been some big games there, notably including the Giants’ 29-14 victory over the Jets on Dec. 24, 2011, a key step on the road to winning Super Bowl XLII.
But overall . . . meh. The Giants’ and Jets’ lack of success during the past decade too often has rendered the stadium big, gray, expensive and empty come late autumn.
Shockingly, there has been only one Jets or Giants playoff game there — the Giants’ 24-2 rout of the Falcons in the wild-card round on Jan. 8, 2012.
Robert Saleh, the Jets’ current head coach, was on the Seahawks’ staff when they won Super Bowl XLVIII at MetLife in 2014, but no head coach has led the Jets into a playoff game there.
One of the most infamous games in the stadium’s history rose from the dead just last weekend, when the Dolphins’ comeback from a 21-point fourth-quarter deficit to beat the Ravens marked an NFL first since the Eagles did it to the Giants in MetLife’s first season in 2010.
All of which is a long way of getting around to the fact that the stadium finally is ready for an early-season close-up this weekend.
The Jets are 1-1 and host the defending AFC champion Bengals on Sunday. The Giants are 2-0 and host the Cowboys on Monday night. They are planning a “white-out” in which fans are being asked to wear white, same as the Giants will.
Rarely in recent seasons have the teams been a combined 3-1 after two weeks, and the fact that both are at home in Week 3 adds to the football juice even as the Yankees and Mets command most of the local sports attention.
What are the chances that both teams will come through? Not great, especially for the Jets, who are facing a presumably angry 0-2 Cincinnati team.
But the point here is that there is reason to care, and at least a reasonable hope for more games to care about beyond the baseball playoffs.
All of the current generation of New York-area sports arenas — a building and renovating spree that began with the Prudential Center in 2007 and ended with the opening of UBS Arena in 2021 — provide more creature comforts than their predecessors.
But some, like Citi Field, have more charm than others.
MetLife is one of the others. But here is the thing about that ocean of gray seats, which were designed to be neutral — and as far from green or blue as possible:
They are not gray when there are people sitting in them, especially when said people are waving white rally towels, as Giants fans will be encouraged to do on Monday night.
Jets and Giants fans are desperate for something to get excited about, and two winning teams would go a long way toward making people like their stadium, or at least dislike it less.
Come midnight Monday, a combined 5-1 record would make the place feel a lot more like home.
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.
