Let’s be perfectly honest for a few paragraphs:
This is one for the die-hards only, for only the truest of the true believers, for the Jets fans who are every bit as obsessed with Gang Green in the quiet football months of late spring and early summer as they are with the 17 games of the season.
Anyone with anything less than a clinical dependence on the Jets? They’re checking the TV listings for alternatives. They’ll spend what promises to be a cool but sunny day walking in Central Park, taking in a matinee, cruising through a museum.
Jets-Dolphins?
For everyone else?
What’s the point? It will be a duel of third-string quarterbacks, Joe Flacco versus Skylar Thompson. It will be a matchup of teams that harbored far higher ambitions just a month and a half ago — jeez, some were even calling the Dolphins a sleeper to come out of the AFC and reach the Super Bowl — who are now on matching five-game losing streaks.
Only the Bears (nine in a row), Cardinals (six) and Colts (six) are playing worse.
The Dolphins were already quivering before Tua Tagovailoa went down with one final concussion of the season. Whatever hope the Jets had of receiving positive quarterback play went down in a hail of cracked Mike White ribs. Zach Wilson will dress Sunday, but there is a genuine sense that the Jets will sooner prefer to play Quinnen Williams at quarterback if anything happens to Flacco.
Joe Flacco will start for the Jets in their season finale against the Dolphins. APSo, yeah. Good times at Hard Rock Stadium!
What does that leave you as a Jets fan?
It leaves you this:
It leaves you, if you are old enough, thinking of the lyrics of an old Don Henley song …
“This is the last/
Worthless weekend/
That you’ll have to spend …”
Because it had better be.
Because even if you are the most patient fan, the most resilient fan, the most optimistic fan, the most unflappable fan, you have broached the beginning of the end of your surplus of patience, resilience, optimism and … well, flappability.
It is now 12 full seasons without a playoff berth, which remains the longest drought in the entire league. It is now seven full seasons without a serious run at a playoff game (no, by now, this season doesn’t count even if the Jets still had destiny in their own hands through 16 weeks and a still-real chance through 17).
It was impossible to know when the Jets left Buffalo after that long-ago Rex Bowl of Jan. 3, 2016, that they were taking the whole store with them and dumping it in Lake Erie on the way home. The Bills quarterback that day? Tyrod Taylor, who will play in another meaningless game Sunday, only that one is a happily meaningless one for the Giants in Philadelphia.
Seven years and five days after that 22-17 loss to the Bills that kept the Jets out of the playoffs despite a 10-6 record, the Jets face something that they know better than any team in the NFL: another worthless final Sunday of the regular season.
It had to stop. Has to stop now.
Next year, Week 18 has to be different. Has to mean something. No, let’s take it farther: It has to mean something even beyond still-in-the-hunt, something beyond win-and-you’re-in. It should be for seeding purposes. It should be for — dare we say it — home field. It should be for something real.
It has to be.
Because even if the Jets have gone from two to four to seven wins — meaning that if the win Sunday in Miami they will have doubled their win totals in consecutive years, which should be a sign of progress — it sure doesn’t feel that way. Five straight losses have soured the feel-good nature of the seven wins that came before.
Jets fans — even the optimists, even the unflappables — don’t have an endless supply of wait-till-next-year in them. And they shouldn’t be asked to re-up. It has to be different this time next year. Has to be. For Jets fans, this must be the last worthless weekend that they’ll have to spend.
