Young Jets are taking off ahead of schedule
New York Jets quarterback Zach Wilson walks off the field after beating the Green Bay Packers at Lambeau Field on Oct. 16, 2022. Credit: AP/Matt Ludtke
The Jets need to make a big change.
Not in their lineups or their schemes. Not in their mentality.
In their tenses.
When a team is as young as they are and have so little recent success to lean on for support, it’s only natural to look ahead and hope for a bright future. That’s what this whole idea of rebuilding the roster is about, after all, changing the persona of the program from pessimistic to promising. It’s about building a team to one day contend for playoff bids and deep postseason runs and, dare it be said, a Super Bowl.
That’s what the Jets have been selling.
Meanwhile, “one day” may be here.
Sunday’s 27-10 win over the Packers was just the latest signal that the franchise’s gauzy future isn’t some far-off fantasy. It’s actually upon us.
“I know we are going to be pretty good,” coach Robert Saleh said after the victory.
It sure seems as if they already are. The quicker they embrace their present and stop thinking of themselves as a team that has yet to arrive and is on the verge of success, the more real their arrival and success will become.
This isn’t a down-the-road team any longer. It’s a now team.
Present tense.
Absolutely there still are obstacles to overcome. The next three weeks leading up to the bye are chief among them. They go on the road to face the Broncos (yes, we can roll our eyes at the challenge, but the Jets can’t), then return to MetLife Stadium for back-to-back division tests against the Patriots and Bills.
In the first game of that home-stand, they will have a chance to exorcise demons against a rival whose brutality toward them over several generations of players and executives still haunts and can cast doubt on their new dynamic toward each other.
Then, in order to demonstrate a dominance in the AFC East that is within their grasp, they must climb and surmount Mount Buffalo.
That would be a statement win. Beating the aging, slipping, undermanned Packers? Good teams like the Jets are supposed to do that even with Aaron Rodgers on the field. Beating the Bills? It would be the ultimate “we are here” moment.
And it’s all within their reach. Not next season or the season after that. This season. This month!
Because they are so young, they are unburdened by history or the future and it should be easy to simply live in the moment. They have six first- or second-year players starting on offense and a defense filled with more upwardly mobile twentysomethings than Coachella. They’re too inexperienced to know that they’re supposed to be a few seasons away from where they are, that they have pushed the plan made by the organization’s elders ahead of schedule.
“We do have good players and we have a good mindset,” Saleh said. “When you are as young as we are, it’s awesome to get confidence.”
These brash kids even mocked some of the most revered (though somewhat silly) traditions of pro football Sunday, with rookie running back Breece Hall celebrating his touchdown run with a Lambeau Leap into the arms of a few welcoming Jets fans and rookie cornerback Sauce Gardner donning a foam cheesehead after the game.
None of it was carried out with a sense of sacrilege, though. It was simply the passing of the cheddar.
Saleh talks often about the difference between faith and belief. The first word requires a leap without any evidence. That’s where the Jets were. The second is about being convinced in the face of a reality. It’s where they are now.
“Some people need to see it happen,” Saleh said Sunday. “The more it becomes a visual, the more you start believing and the more confidence you get.”
The Jets have earned the right to stop merely having faith in themselves.
It’s time to believe.
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.
