The Jets high stakes gamble MUST payoff in 2024

 For the thirteenth consecutive season, the New York Jets will be watching the playoffs from their couches. For a fourth straight season the Jets will have at least 10 losses. What a familiar place we find ourselves in!

After an offseason that had the Jets shoehorned as the AFC representative in the Super Bowl with the arrival of Aaron Rodgers, in just a few months since then they have returned to being football’s biggest laughingstock.

Following an embarrassing loss to the Cleveland Browns on Thursday Night Football last week, a game in which Cleveland qualified for postseason play, and had former Jet signal caller Joe Flacco lighting up the Jets defense, Jet fans can feel the immense pressure of the other shoe falling like an anvil atop their heads. Another season has ended and with it comes the usual misery.

The blame for all the bad football this year since Aaron Rodgers laid lifeless on the MetLife turf four plays into the season should fall on the shoulders of two men, Joe Douglas and Robert Saleh. Who both basically got a one-year extension two weeks ago before a Pepto Bismol inducing win over the Washington that had disaster around every corner in the second half.

So, in a sense, the two men also got a weeks’ worth of a pass from the angry mob that is now standing outside their doors at One Jets Drive. That mob being as angry, justifiably, as ever.

The problems ailing the Jets from a chance at breaking the longest playoff drought in Major American sports are clear. They’ve been clear since Douglas and Saleh signed on the dotted line. They are, but not limited to, the leagues unhealthiest and easiest to impetrate Offensive Line in football, a bottom three quarterback room, and the highest penalized team in the sport. To be somewhat fair to Saleh and Douglas these three problems are the hardest for any team to solve in the NFL, but when the problems are as crystal clear as they were when Douglas and Saleh took over; to still be having the same issues, and in many cases have worsen those issues, Woody Johnson should be calling for cardboard boxes not giving out handshakes and promotions.

We were all wrong about putting the Jets in the Super Bowl, and not because they have proven to be those “same ‘ole Jets,” but because they aren’t good enough. Even with a healthy Aaron Rodgers the playoffs weren’t a “guarantee” with this 2023 squad. They are collectively a bad football team. A team that the league and networks won’t be putting in prime time (at least at the start of 2024) with Rodgers behind center. And fixing the 2023 Jets problem won’t be as easy in practice or on paper as it was last year. There isn’t a clear Aaron Rodgers type fix either this offseason. There is no guarantee that Rodgers will take the same pay cut next year like he did before this training camp. Next year will in many ways be like dozens of Jets seasons before it, have minimal expectations on paper. Oh wait… no it won’t!

The 2024 season for the Jets will be the biggest season in franchise history. It will have the weight of six elephants. Next year is everything for the Jets and nobody will have the ill illusioned faith that they had this year. Sure, the same group will be waving their green and white pompoms in July when Rodgers jogs onto the practice field for training camp, and there will still the same electricity through the stadium when the ball is officially kicked off in September, but all of it will be different, because it is, because it has to be. Because this win now fix that Woody Johnson, Joe Douglas, and Robert Saleh flew across the country to bring to New York MUST work!

There is no getting off the mat if the Rodgers experiment doesn’t yield a playoff run and Super Bowl championship. The ugly reality if Rodgers doesn’t deliver on his promise is another decade of failure and ineptitude. And for a franchise that has tripped over itself in the most laughable ways in sports history, the dream of scaling the mountain and holding the Lombardi Trophy at the peak is like trying to climb Mount Everest with swimming flippers on.

 

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