Why Your Team Sucks 2016: New York Jets

Some people are fans of the New York Jets. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the New York Jets. This 2016 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. And buy Drew’s new book here. Your team: New York Jets. Your 2015 record: 10-6. Let’s see how it ended! To jog your memory, that was the last of three consecutive drive-killing interceptions that cost the Jets a playoff spot and OBLITERATED any possible goodwill generated from the previous 15 games. The Jets waited until jussssssssst the last second to turn back into the Jets. Against Rex fucking Ryan, of all people. It was astonishing to behold. Also, Brandon Marshall can’t lateral for SHIT. And the team’s Color Rush uniforms made the colorblind fully blind. Your coach: Todd Bowles. Take it from a fan of a similarly dumb franchise: your seemingly decent, defensive-minded head coach will ALWAYS be undone by the hapless boob he decided to install as offensive coordinator. For the Jets, that’s Chan Gailey. No matter how far you go, Chan will be there to shit on the gearshift at the very end. Your quarterback: Oh! Oh, this is the good part, my friends. I did last year’s Jets preview BEFORE Geno Smith got his jaw scrambled over a $600 plane ticket, so this a real windfall for me today. Let’s run down what is, as it stands now, arguably the funniest depth chart in league history. FIRST STRING: Harvard Boy. Cue the beard… As you know, the Jets and Ryan Fitzpatrick came crawling back to each other at the end of last month after both sides in the contract dispute realized they had no leverage of any kind. Fitz and the Jets are a pair of sad winos meeting together in a fleabag motel room after getting kicked out of every other bar in town. Keep in mind that the Denver Broncos decided to spurn Fitzpatrick in favor of a man the Jets themselves sent packing three years ago. That’s how little they thought of Fitz. Turns out, the Jets don’t think much of him either, engaging in a hostile standoff with both him and DT Muhammad Wilkerson for the better part of the offseason. I’m sure the rest of the team was pleased to see their bosses treat both men like disposable wet wipes. No matter how good of a front this franchise puts up, dysfunction is ALWAYS there, ready to pop out from behind a nearby shrub: a loaded Buttfumble waiting to happen. And it says something that Fitz is, by far, the Jets’ BEST option at quarterback. Somehow, they would inevitably be far worse off without the man who just threw three fucking picks in a row to ruin their season. Because… SECOND STRING: There are currently four QBs on this roster and, unless the Jets are completely stupid (never count them out), one of them has to be cut. Gee, I wonder who might not have an open chair when the music stops. Could it be the frowny-faced turnover machine who can’t even board a plane without fucking up? ONE CAN ONLY SURMISE. Even when Geno Smith got his mouth shattered and had to rest for a few weeks, he couldn’t even get THAT right. I wouldn’t hire Geno to be the line leader in a preschool class, much less be a pro quarterback. I’ll never get over him trying to stiff a guy who earned a fraction of his salary. I bet he tips waiters in all pennies. THIRD STRING: Bryce Petty, who basically played flag football in college and will be a “project” quarterback until age 49. Any time you mention playing Petty to a Jets staffer, they react as if you asked a human baby to drive a car. OMG HE’S NOT READY AT ALL JUST GIVE HIM A FEW DECADES. FOURTH STRING: AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. That’s your second round draft choice, kiddos: a kid so woefully inaccurate that Pro Football Focus wouldn’t even GRADE him for the Draft. And when scouts asked Christian Hackenberg why he was so fucking terrible in college, he blamed his coaches. Wrong answer, young man. TAKE SOME DAMN RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR SUCKINESS. As always, the Jets are fucked before even setting out to play a regular season game. They are the True North of oncoming catastrophe. What’s new that sucks: Matt Forte! I hope you’re as excited as I am to watch his slow and inevitable decline now that he’s decided to play in running back purgatory! Without D’Brickashaw Ferguson around to block (Ferguson will be replaced by Ryan Clady, who might hurt himself reading this sentence), Forte is a dead man. Also, Sheldon Richardson was suspended for a game for drag racing. Kinda shocking he didn’t manage to hit Geno while tearing ass down the boulevard at 143 mph. What has always sucked: This team is second fiddle in every way: in its own town, in its own division, in LIFE. The rare moments of triumph they get to experience are when Bill Belichick happens to fuck up an overtime coin toss, or when Antonio Cromartie defeats his own vasectomy. When you’re the Jets, you gotta hope that God does you a favor if you ever want to taste success. Which is at it should be. I got friends who are Jets fans who never, ever walk around in team apparel. They disclose their Jets fandom like that shit is a nut allergy. They know. They know EXACTLY what the rest of the world thinks of this garbage team and its garbage fans. The second you pull a Wayne Chrebet jersey over your giant belly, you are Vinny from Syosset, spewing racial epithets and double-fisting meatball subs and screaming GABBAGOOL half-jokingly but also not jokingly, and calling into WFAN every seven seconds, and waving your dick at every pair of tits that crosses your line of vision. If I walk into a bar and I see anyone wearing Jets gear, I already know I’ve made a terrible mistake… I’ve wandered headlong into a bridge-and-tunnel nightmare from which I may never escape. Did you know this team went and begged Fireman Ed to come back? Like he was the Ambassador of Florence? The New York Jets organization asked me to come back and lead the chant with the new leaders of the chant one last time. I know the fan base loves the chant and rocking our house and I know that the tradition will continue with these energetic and passionate leaders. Go to Hell, Fireman Ed. You are dumb and your chant is even dumber. They should fill MetLife to the brim with poop and drown Fireman Ed in it. Also, this team couldn’t find a decent tight end even if you gave them a map and a compass. Fuck. What might not suck: Revis! Why, signing him was like winning eight Super Bowls if you ask the New York Post! Let’s remember some Jets: Pat Leahy Browning Nagle James Hasty Brooks Bollinger Jason Ferguson Hear it from Jets fans! John: We’ll never win. Have mercy on my unborn children. Alex: Thanksgiving 2012. I spent all day hungover on the couch, watching the Texans and the Lions trying their hardest to end the game in a tie (they sadly didn’t), and took a nap during the Cowboys game, because I was HYPED for Jets-Patriots that night. “Game of the season!!” I shouted at my dad as I sat down on the couch at 8:00pmwith a fresh DOUBLE cup of coffee, which I polished off shortly before kickoff. Things were looking great, tied 0-0 going into the 2nd quarter. The caffeine is RAGING in my veins. We all know what happened next. :52 seconds, 21 points, including my boy Mark Sanchez got pulled into the black gravity hole of Brandon Moore’s asshole, and the score was quickly 35-7. And boy oh boy, I was so wide awake for it I thought I could read minds. Just in time to get a text from a friend who was at the game. “My son took off all his Jets gear and is sarcastically clapping for every play the Pats make.” Fuck the Jets. Fuck Mark Sanchez. And fuck Tim Tebow’s run in the rain that made Skip Bayless throw his dick on the table of First Take. MichaelJeter: I’m a Jets fan in my late 20s, and going into last season I owned five jerseys: Mark Sanchez Jericho Cotchery LaDainian Tomlinson Darrelle Revis Brett Favre You know what? I think I’ll just wear a hat this year. Frosted Nuts: The owner of most TDs in a single Jets season was in a stalemate with our GM whose leverage was a guy who couldn’t play last year due to drinking smoothies for 6 weeks. Brady is suspended for 4 games and everyone agrees that despite one of the best defenses in the league, the Jets still don’t stand a chance to win the division. Fuck Mike Tannenbaum. Nick: Defense? Check. Running game? Check. Receivers? As of last year, check for once. QB and decent fucking management? God forbid. Fitzmagic is going to take us to the fucking bank for his average Harvard fuckery of quarterbacking. 10-6 should get most teams to the playoffs, but fuck us with a rusted Pats’ Lombardi trophy. God. Fucking. Damn it. Bernd: In 2003, the Jets invented the scam of charging fans $50 a year to stay on their season ticket waiting list ( as documented by BusinessWeek: ). At some point, the NY State Attorney General’s Office took notice of this side business, and decided to investigate. That dragged on until 2008, at which point the Jets decided to abandon the program, make the waiting list free of charge, and refund or credit any payments that had been made. So even at their most creative, the Jets couldn’t even run a proper scam. To make the whole thing even more amusing, the year they made the waiting list free happened to be exactly the year the recession hit. I signed up in fall of ‘08 and spent all of spring 2009 getting ever more frequent emails from the Jets, offering me the once-in-a-lifetime chance to buy season tickets. Then half-season tickets. Then single-game tickets. So much for that waiting list. All in all, I spent four years living in New York and I never once made it out to a Jets game. Zach: My buddy sent me an article today quoting all the recent hot-take-spawning stats about how Fitzpatrick’s uncanny ability to throw the football to the other team was suppressed by such factors as luck and missed opportunities by defenders (presumably those who mistook him for a bearded homeless man and took pity on him). He also was among dead last in deep throw accuracy, blah blah, etc. I replied with “I know, I’ve been finding a lot of these— I kind of understand just wanting to start Geno.” And then it hit me… this is a franchise that somehow tricked me into thinking Sanchize might be the answer, then not. Then somehow I found myself on the Geno train, and when it slowed down went from eagerly accepting Ryan-Fucking-Fitzpatrick, to anointing him a potential savior, to being fine with the prospect of casting would-be savior aside for aforementioned Geno Smith once again. Is this a money saving ploy? (Star QBs can get expensive) Is it brilliant marketing? Is siding with the Long Island/New Jersey rabble simply lowering my IQ? Has Fitzpatrick himself built a machine to siphon my IQ like the Riddler in Batman Forever? If I were the Jets, I’d draft QBs only, every round, ever year, until one of them looked objectively not-like-a-dumpster-fire. By then we’d be depleted of any skill players worth holding onto, but at least we can take all the resulting stash and spend it on aging retreads to surround him with just like every other proper NY sports team. I’d much rather follow that product. Ray: Doug Brien just needs to make a chip shot field goal and we beat the Yinzers and go to the AFC Championship Game. After having a perfect regular season and bragging about it, he shanks both chances and we lose. As a broken down 6-year-old I stared at the television mouth agape, eyes welling up. My father, stoic as can be, finishes his beer, pats me on the shoulder, and says “Welcome to being a Jets fan.” and went to bed. Also FUCK Bill Belichick, and FUCK Rex Ryan. Roy: I am a Jets season ticket holder and proud owner of a personal seat license with a balance higher than my son’s student loan debt. Two years ago, in a stadium filled with at least 70,000 “fans,” representatives of the team came to me to say that I had just won two tickets anywhere Jet Blue flies in the US. So my son and I flew to Seattle and joined up with his childhood friend who was playing lead guitar for a proto-punk group. Then we followed the tour down the coast for ten days, ending up in San Jose. A great time was had, and all courtesy of the NY Jets. And yet I still hate this fucking team. Matt: Fuck Doug Brien with both Heinz Field crossbars. Tim: Here’s a list of the best Jets quarterbacks of the last decade: 1) A guy who tore his throwing shoulder mid-season. Famous for sending dick pics to the team trainer. 2) A guy we refuse to pay more than backup money. He went to Harvard though. 3) A guy most famous for running into his own lineman’s ass on national television. Also famous for dating a 17-year-old from CT. 4) Greg McElroy No one hates the Jets as much as Jets fans do. Steve: Was at a Jets game two seasons ago. Near our tailgate spot was an old assed camper with about 20 Jets faithful partying in and about the camper area. At one point, what looks to be a 19-year-old kid comes walking out of the camper holding a large plastic tray of vegetable with the clear plastic cover affixed. The kid wasn’t out of the camper for more than 12 seconds when a grown man who appeared to be the kid’s father walked up to him and smashed the platter out of his hands. Veggies, ranch dressing and the plastic tray went flying. The father walked away without saying anything and the kid didn’t even shrug his shoulders. He just stood there for a moment and walked away. That was the saddest part: the two Jets fan were so indifferent to each other and the violence of the act. That’s when I knew the trueness of Jets nation. For the coup de gras, a Ford F-150 drove by a moment later crushing the plastic tray and cover. Nicholas: At this point, my status of “New York Jets fan” exists only through a stout combination of irony and masochism. Thomas: This past season, with a 10-5 record coming off an improbable win against the Patriots, all the Jets had to do was not shit the bed against their bloviating troll of an ex-head coach, Rex Ryan. Do this, and they make the playoffs. And god damn it, they really looked like a playoff team. How do they handle it? Revis gets toasted by Sammy Watkins all game, Fitzpatrick throws three picks in the 4th quarter, and I end up in my bed in a drunken fetal ball muttering “time is a flat circle…” It was by far the best Jets season this decade. The vast majority of Andrew Dice Clay’s personal wealth was handed to him by Jets fans in the 1980s. Kyle: TOM FUCKING BRADY IS OUT 4 GAMES AND THEY’RE STILL GOING TO WIN THE FUCKING DIVISION. GOD I HATE THE PATRIOTS. Nick: -If I have to watch Mark Sanchez win a fucking Super Bowl this year I may just spontaneously combust. – I grew up in Albany. There are somehow more Packers fans in Albany than Jets fans. The day after the 2010 AFC Championship Game, a Packers fans walked right by me at morning meeting and said “Sorry, I only sit next to winners.” Still stings to this day – I sat to sit through Week 17 last year vs. the Bills as my Rex Ryan fathead and his eight fucking chins grinned at me from the wall. Jon: I went to a Jet game once. The tailgate began with me witnessing men shirtless eating hot dogs off of each other’s stomachs as some sort of test of masculinity. I still haven’t processed that moment fully. The Jets got blown out 49-7. I’ve never been to a game since. Mike: My brother was Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard. He graduated at the top of his med school class at Columbia. He was born and raised in New England. He roots for the Jets. That makes him the dumbest fucking guy I know. Ethan: We had lost the last five games to the Bills, a perpetually mediocre team who now had our old mediocre coach. We had pissed away the first game against the Bills, and I had to watch fucking Rex Ryan celebrating like his team won the fucking Super Bowl in a regular season game. Our new coach Todd Bowles seemed like a competent and smart coach. Seemed. Until during the Bills game, he decided not to feature our thousand yard back, Chris Ivory, but instead feature Stevan fucking Ridley. If your first thought reading this was, “Stevan Ridley is still in the league?” you have way more sense than Todd Bowles. This is also a game where our kicker missed a field goal, our punter shanked a punt 25 yards, our QB could barely throw a spiral, and our $17 mil-a-year CB got completely torched by Sammy Watkins. Despite this, we were somehow driving in the Red Zone only down 19-17. Then Ryan Fitzpatrick threw a pick in the end zone. One of THREE 4th quarter picks. Fuck Ryan Fitzpatrick. I can’t remember the amount of times he got bailed out by Marshall or had opposing DBs drop an easy pick. I can’t think of a more obvious candidate for regression. He wants starter money? Fuck that. I’d rather watch Geno try to put a ball behind his back. Honestly, the season was a mirage. Our defense was only decent. Our schedule was ridiculously easy. Even the games we won, felt like the other team lost the game for us. The games we lost were usually close, but really should’ve been blowouts. I think Rich Kotite could’ve won 7 games with our schedule. It’s fitting that the Bills were the ones that ended us, because if we’re being honest they ARE us. We pretend we’re higher class because we play in NYC, but we’re the same mouth-breathing idiots that Bills fans are. We make fun of them for buying into Rex Ryan even as we pretended he was a good coach for SIX years. We deserve to lose to the Bills for eternity. Oh, and also we drafted Christian Hackenburg in the second round. Beef: Only the Jets could be held hostage by Ryan Fucking Fitzpatrick. Adam: I’ll just say this, my favorite football player when I was a kid was Fred Baxter. No one should have to know that about themselves. Rob: This offseason, I waited on bated breath for months to see if the Jets would be able to sign Ryan Fitzpatrick. The guy who couldn’t stick around in St. Louis, Cincinnati, Buffalo, Tennessee, or Houston for more than about 4 hours. These are teams that have had about 1.5 good quarterbacks between the five of them over the past decade, and they wanted nothing to do with the guy. But Fitzmagic was the best quarterback the Jets have seen since Bilbo Pennington, so everyone was on the edge of their seat. During this waiting period, three distinctly idiotic fanbases emerged: 1. The people who thought we needed to throw all the money/years in the world at him. He had the best statistical season ever for a Jets quarterback. Neve rmind the fact that he had the best receiving pair in the league to throw to, and still fucked up against Rex Ryan and the goddamn Buffalo Bills to cost us a playoff spot. 2. The people who thought we needed to give Geno another shot. WE SWEAR HE’LL BE GOOD THIS TIME! HE SHOWED SOME ENCOURAGING SIGNS! HE’LL HAVE DECKER/MARSHALL NOW! Never mind the fact that you could give Geno a receiving corps of Rice/Moss/Megatron and he’d still just throw an interception while targeting a triple-covered Jace Amaro. 3. The people who have never watched a second of college football yet think that Bryce Petty or Christian Hackenberg will be the savior straight out of the middle rounds of the draft. This is solely based off of the fact that the Jets drafted them, so they must be good, right? And all were convinced they were right. At no point does it cross anyone’s mind that we’re fucked regardless. I often tried to sit there and think about which of these groups was the dumbest. Then I realized it’s all of us. All of us Jets fans are just fucking idiots. That’s why we’re here. Can’t wait til Mark Sanchez leads the Broncos to a Super Bowl win this year. Andrew: I went to the home opener 3 years ago and sat behind these two bros with their special Jets handshake that they did whenever the Jets did anything positive on the field. I wanted the throw myself from the top of Snoopy Stadium. CZ: Fuck Kyle Wilson, fuck John Idzik, fuck Eric Mangini, and fuck this team for being the ones who gave Brady a chance. Mike: The Jets have now resigned Fitz and immediately Brandon Marshall wagers his Porsche against Antonio Brown over who will have more receiving yards this year. This will all but guarantee that Marshall blows out a knee in Week 1 (probably via a Vontaze Burfict cheap shot). Mike: I still own my Chad Pennington jersey from 2004. It’s the one I wear on game days. Because Chad is the best Jets QB I’ve seen, probably the best one since Namath, and I hope that when I die (I’m 30) that’s still not true. I went to Penn State and Hackenberg sucks. This team will never have a good QB. No matter how good the defense is we’ll be perpetually 8-8 because we don’t have a QB. Quinn: My dad is a member of a pretty idiosyncratic subgroup of New York fans: guys who grew up on Long Island in the 60's/70's and who defected to Mets and Jets fandom to upend the fusty old guard of Yankees and Giants devotion. My dad was really annoyed when they moved out of the state to New Jersey to share the most ass stadium in the country with their hated rivals/older brothers in the early 80s. And so my dad waited for them to return. When Giants Stadium was going to shit, my dad waited in joyful hope that the Jets would make a statement and return to New York. Penny-pinching cowards they are, they moved into their older brother’s house once again, signing on for a lease that could last almost 100 years. This time, their new home wasn’t just total ass: it had less character than any stadium ever. Ever been to MetLife stadium? It’s a big, grey, New-Jersey-as-fuck blob in a swamp that replaced a big, grey, New-Jersey-as-fuck blob in a swamp. I remember the day he heard the Jets had signed on the lease. The deflation I saw in him – his childhood shunted off to New Jersey, forever – was psychically painful. Enough of these guys pretending to be a “New York” squad. They moved out of Cortland for training and to New Jersey. They’re as Jersey as they come: loudmouthed, whinging, classless manbabies, forever playing second fiddle to their superior neighbors. Fuck the Jets with all of Nassau County. Brian: How it is that this organization hasn’t stumbled into a quarterback since Namath left in 1976? Of the four best guys since then, two of them (Testaverde, Fitzpatrick) were journeymen who lucked into an inheriting an awesome receiving corps and had a big year (singular). The other two are Chad “I can’t throw the ball more than 15 yards downfield” Pennington and Ken “Holy shit! You took this guy over Dan Marino?!?” O’Brien. Just shoot me in the fucking face and get it over with. John: I’m only 26 and I happily wear my Vinny Testaverde jersey every autumn Sunday. For the first time in my life, I desperately want the Jets to come to terms with the same QB we had last year. He was decent. He didn’t actively lose games for us. That QB is Ryan Fitzpatrick. Ol’ Journeybeard himself. Shit. Woody Johnson is a used diaper of a human. Brad: Three years ago, I won tickets to a Heat/Knicks game at Madison Square Garden. It was the weekend of the Super Bowl. My best friend and I got into the city early to hit a couple bars and enjoy some afternoon college basketball as there was a triple header prior to the Knicks game. First spot we stopped at was The Blarney Rock. The place had been taken over by Seahawks fans and it was an incredible atmosphere. After a couple Bud Lights, there was some commotion and when we turned around a mid-20 something or other in a Jets jersey was being escorted out for being too drunk. His other three friends, also in Jets jerseys, were trying to convince the bouncer to let him stay. When the bouncer said no, the other three turned around to follow when they stopped and saw their friend outside the window (as well as the rest of the bar) vomiting all over the sidewalk. All over the window. All over himself. It never stopped. My friend and I to this day say it was the most puke we’ve ever seen one person produce. Some poor dishwasher had to take like 15 buckets of water outside to wash that crap off the sidewalk. This happened at 12:30 in the afternoon the day before the Super Bowl. Also, the Jetswere not in the Super Bowl. Richard: Both my sons know if they say Doug Brien’s name out loud I will instantly go berserk, which they think is hysterical. Fuck Doug Brien with an overinflated football. Anon: I have experienced a lot of pathetic shit as a Jets fan, so I won’t pretend this is at the top of the list, but this offseason’s melodrama / contract standoff with Ryan Fitzpatrick — the man who would’ve thrown nine interceptions in the 4th quarter of that playoff ruining game last season if given the chance — was a new flavor of pitiful. Making me have to care about Ryan Fitzpatrick, making me have to NEED him, is just super mean, guys. By the way, this offseason has proven that Ryan Fitzpatrick is yet another diabolical Harvard genius. Look at what he pulled off: he is an utterly mediocre quarterback — the ur-mediocre QB in the league right now — and he single handedly ruined the most crucial quarter of the season for the Jets, in the epically, comically, classically Jetsy fashion…. Yet somehow this offseason he has managed to completely flip the script, make Jets fans forget how “FITZMAGIC” curdled into a cruel joke and instead convince us that we must re-sign him no matter what or we’ll go 1-8 with Geno Smith (Christ) at QB until Brandon Marshall breaks his jaw at midfield in the middle of a game after he throws his seventh pick-six of the season. Way to go, Jets front office! You got Harvard’d. There was no market for Fitzpatrick beyond the Jets — so Fitzpatrick made the Jets negotiate against their depth chart. I hate the Jets. Other than that we had a nice offseason. I like Matt Forte. He’s good. Submissions for the Deadspin NFL previews are now closed. Next up: Washington Redskins. 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