The Jets are not yet in the conversation for the worst football team in NFL history. There’s still a lot of losing to be done before they can join the pitiable ranks of the 2017 Browns and 2008 Lions, who went 0-16, or the ’76 Buccaneers, who went 0-14, or the ’60 Cowboys, who went 0-11-1, or the ’82 Colts, who went 0-8-1.

Lots of (bad) ballgame left, as they say.

But the Jets did enter Monday night’s tilt with their ancient rivals from New England in fine shape to take a few more steps toward making a real go of the race for worst team in New York’s pro football history. For 76 glorious years, that has been the sole purview of the 1944 Brooklyn Tigers, who played 10 games and lost them all.

They are — we’ll stop short of saying “were” — the only NFL team ever assembled within the five boroughs of New York to ever go winless. The 1944 season was an odd one, as were most sporting seasons of the time. D-Day had happened two months before the start of training camp. World War II was raging at its fiercest all across that season.

The Tigers weren’t even alone in their misery; the team referred to as “Card-Pitt” also went 0-10. The war inspired the Steelers to merge a couple of times to survive; in 1943 that meant joining forces with the other Pennsylvania team to form the “Steagles.” And in ’44 it meant a strange Chicago-Pittsburgh alliance that, in truth, probably denies the ’44 Tigers from even being declared the worst team of that year (since the two teams didn’t play, that dubious distinction couldn’t be settled on the field).

(The Cardinals half of the partnership also takes the prize for the worst team of the war era if not of all time. They’d lost the last six games of the ’42 season, lost all 10 games in ’43, took at least half credit for all 10 of Card-Pitt’s losses in ’44 and then lost the first three games of a 1-9 season in ’45 for a 29-game losing streak. HAPPY NOTE FOR JETS FANS: By 1947, the Cardinals recovered to win their second and last title in Chicago.)

But make no mistake: those Tigers were brutal. For the previous 13 years of their existence they had shared the nickname of Ebbets Field’s other tenants, the Dodgers. The baseball team was affectionately known as the Bums; the football team was, too, but with a lowercase “b” and significantly less good will attached.

The Tigers were picked to be a middling team and, in truth, their season looked a lot more like the 2020 Giants’ than the 2019 Jets’ as they often found curious ways to lose in the end: The first nine games they dropped by an average of just seven points — including twice to the Giants by that margin, 14-7 at Ebbets Field in early October, 7-0 at the Polo Grounds in late November (the Giants crushed Card-Pitt, 23-0).

But it was an odd season for sure. On Oct. 30, coach Pete Cawthon resigned with the team sitting at 0-5 when he had a loud argument with GM Tom Gallery that nearly came to fisticuffs.

“He kept sabotaging me,” Cawthon said of his boss. “I couldn’t take or tolerate the interference any longer.”

Gallery offered the job to line coach Ed Kubale, who (not surprisingly) was reluctant to sign on: “This thing came like a bolt out of the blue,” Kubale said. “I’ll sleep on it and go to Brooklyn in the morning.”

When morning arrived, so did a dubious decision: Kubale would be joined by end coach Frank Bridges, and they would serve as “co-coaches.”

“We have played stinking football,” Cawthon declared. “If the new coaches show promising results they will return.”

(NOTE TO CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: if we can’t have entertaining football, can’t we have cool front-office intrigue like this?)

The new coaches showed the same result as the old one: an 0-5 record, capped by a 34-0 no-show at Philly’s Shibe Park to the Eagles in the season finale. Kubale and Bridges were dismissed the moment the train pulled to a stop in Brooklyn. The next April, owner Dan Topping (who also owned the baseball Yankees) merged the team with the old Boston Yanks, and except for a brief stint in the AAFC a few years later, Brooklyn’s days as a pro football city were over.

The end result for the 2020 Jets, no matter what happens from here, won’t be quite so pyrrhic.

Probably.