The rankings insist the Jets are 1-1, two behind and 15 to play this season. The ranking lies. The season, their season, whatever this season is going to bring, starts next Sunday, at 1 p.m., at MetLife Stadium. Whoever the Jets are, whoever they are, whoever they are, it starts then.
The Patriots are on the sideline next Sunday, and that hasn’t been a comforting thing in nearly a quarter century for the Jets. GOOD. Make it even harder. Make the consequences even more serious. We still don’t really know who the Jets are, and it’s likely that even they don’t know.
Around 4 p.m. next Sunday, we will all know.
Sunday in Dallas? Let’s be honest: Even the most ardent Jets acolyte had a hard time imagining anything other than what happened, which was a painstaking 30-10 hammering at the hands of a Cowboys team that has now blasted its way through both New York teams by a combined 70-10.
Even with Aaron Rodgers, this game was going to be a bear.
Without him…well, there was exactly one moment where the Jets looked like they belonged on the field with the Cowboys. Zach Wilson had just made a nice tipped pass to Garrett Wilson and 68 yards later the Jets were up 10-7. Four plays later, Dak Prescott threw a ball directly to Sauce Gardner who had nothing but an open field in front of him.
Gardner dropped the ball. No choice six.
No shots. You could almost see Prescott heaving a sigh of relief. What you definitely saw was Prescott threading the Jets all the way. The only time he wasn’t the best player on the field was when Dallas’ defense was on the field, at which point Micah Parsons simply looked like the closest thing to Lawrence Taylor since LT himself.
“We didn’t give our defense a chance to get off the field on third down,” Jets coach Robert Saleh said, “nor did our offense have much of a chance to do anything.”
The Cowboys are so good. They have already reduced two opponents to dust. They will do this to others. The Patriots are also a very good team; It’s not the Cowboys. And the Jets will be at home. It’s tough to call Week 3 of a season a must-win game, especially against a team with this pedigree, but what can you do? The NFL is a tough place.
“It won’t snowball,” Saleh insisted. “Dallas played a very good game. They played as well as possible.
He better be right. And the Jets better be right. Again: Even with Rodgers, if you told the Jets they would be 1-1 after two weeks, they would have signed up. By 9 p.m. Monday night, they certainly would have. So the Jets won a game they certainly could have lost and lost a game they were in for about 47 seconds.
Now we see. Now we will learn. Zach Wilson had three picks (especially after the game got out of hand) and was on the run most of the day, but that loss wasn’t on Wilson. That’s the only really tough thing the Jets face between now and Sunday.
Their defense is their pride and signature, and the fuel behind any optimism that remains, even with Rodgers in a cast. On Sunday, this unit was shredded by Prescott, who continued to find wide open receivers, and was only sacked once. And the running game – essential every week to help Wilson – was invisible. The Jets gained just 64 yards on the ground – 36 by the quarterback.
It simply won’t be enough.
This will not be enough at all.
“It’s tough, man,” Wilson said. “I thought I was seeing okay, but we kept stopping.”
Saleh said: “You have to be efficient. You have to stay one step ahead of the chains.
They did neither. They paid the price. Now the season begins.
They are 1-1, as it seems most of the league is. The abrupt start to the six-game schedule, which was always going to be an obstacle, is a third of the way through; now they have the Patriots, an old-fashioned AFL grudge match at an old-fashioned kickoff time, Sunday at 1 p.m. They will walk onto the field with everything they hope to accomplish still intact.
We’ll see what it looks like when they leave three hours later.
New York Post
