Jets & Giants: At a loss for words for NY's two losing franchises
Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers, left, and Giants quarterback Daniel Jones. Credit: AP; Jim McIsaac
About the best thing anyone can say about New York-area football right now is that for the next two weekends, we will be subjected to a combined total of only two Jets and Giants games.
These wretched seasons couldn’t even make it to their bye weeks before landing in irrelevant despair. Thanksgiving is a week and a half away, and already the two franchises feel as if they are starting over.
Out in Florham Park, they are demonstrating — to professionals, mind you — how to tackle an opponent the way Pop Warner coaches might do it. And in East Rutherford, they are trying to figure out who will be their starting quarterback for the rest of the schedule . . . or at least for their next game. These are first-day-of-training camp actions taking place deep in a season that wasn’t supposed to be anything like this.
John Wooden used to start each basketball season at UCLA with the basics of instructing players on how to properly wear their socks to avoid blisters. At this point, these Giants and Jets would have trouble mastering such applications of footwear.
At least they are aware of their dismal statuses.
On Tuesday, Giants general manager Joe Schoen used words such as “painful,” and “hurts” to describe this campaign. Schoen was the centerpiece of the offseason edition of “Hard Knocks,” and now he and his team are really taking the hits.
“The results have not been what we wanted them to be,” Schoen said. “I don’t want to be sitting up here at 2-8. Like, that’s not what we want and nobody’s happy about it.”
On Wednesday, Jets interim coach Jeff Ulbrich touched upon the fate of his underachieving squad and the misery they have wrought.
“It’s obviously been extremely hard on everybody, players, coaches, everybody, because we all had high expectations,” he said. “It wasn’t just the fan base, it wasn’t just the outside world. The fact that we have fallen short to this point in the season, it’s been extremely disappointing and it’s been extremely hard, challenging in a lot of ways.”
Then again, how could they possibly spin their current efforts as anything but putrid? The two teams have totaled five wins. There are 15 teams in the league who have at least that many by themselves. The Bills — the only actual New York team — have three more victories than the two New Jersey squads have together.
Between them, they can’t even come up with a decent number of interceptions. Remarkably, the Giants have one and the Jets have two. Every other team in the league besides the Browns has at least three of those takeaways.
Changes will be coming soon, of course. The Giants won’t be swapping out their general manager or coach — at least according to the general manager himself and hints from ownership — but they almost certainly will have a new quarterback in place when the 2025 season begins. There will be other improvements attempted, too, including more rebuilding of the offensive line, a focus on fixing the run defense and finding some veteran presence in the secondary.
The Jets are a bit more complicated. Unlike the Giants, they went all-in on this season, and now that they are just about all-out of it, there are messes to clean up.
It’s hard to see Aaron Rodgers returning for a 21st NFL season after this ordeal. Even if he wanted to for some reason, as he recently suggested, why would the Jets want it? He’s not going to get better, just older.
That divorce and others will require some financial pains. The Jets most likely will be looking for a new coach and general manager, too. Given owner Woody Johnson’s attraction to making hires and signings that are big on splash value and light on substance, it should be a wild search. Jon Gruden and Deion Sanders are among names that already have been floated in some circles. At this point, just for the headlines, would anyone be surprised if Johnson made a run at signing Juan Soto?
We still have 14 more games involving the two teams to get through before any of that happens, though. Almost a full schedule’s worth of games for these two troupes of misfits. Sigh.
At least there is some real football to watch while our locals take time to regroup. There are three games scheduled this week between teams with at least seven wins each, the most ever at this point in a season. It started on Thursday night with the Eagles beating the Commanders (two teams the Giants compete against in the NFC East). It continues on Sunday with the Ravens facing the Steelers and the Bills against Kansas City, either of which could be an AFC Championship Game preview.
Thank goodness for that exciting slate, or else the Jets-Colts game on Sunday might have had to stand as the prime-time contest it originally was scheduled to be. It was bumped in favor of the Chargers and Bengals.
Imagine that? Aaron Rodgers and the Jets kicked out of a prime-time window? Too bad the Giants-Cowboys game, which is shaping up to be a huge turkey, can’t be flexed out of its Thanksgiving time slot.
Perhaps one day soon, things will change around here. They have to, right? One of these two teams will rise to meet expectations instead of both crumbling beneath them. They’ll make sound decisions for their staffs, in their personnel and during the actual games, and it will pay off with wins and promise and optimism. It’s a league designed to create parity and allow franchises to move quickly from last-place doorstops to title contenders, after all.
This, though, is all but officially the 13th straight year that neither the Jets nor Giants have taken full advantage of that system. That’s 26 combined seasons since the Giants won a Super Bowl, during which the two teams have played three postseason games — all by the Giants — and none in the stadium the two teams share.
Since 2014, the three teams with the worst cumulative records are the Jaguars (56-117), Jets (58-115) and Giants (62-110-1). During that span, no one has scored fewer points (3,146) or touchdowns (330) than the Jets. The second-worst in both categories? The Giants (3,391 points, 374 touchdowns).
It’s something to think about as the two teams approach the coming weeks without concurrent games on their schedules.
Good byes? No. The worst.
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.
