Last season’s opener saw Justin Fields put together an impressive performance as he completed 16 of 22 passes for 218 yards and a touchdown while also rushing for 48 yards and two scores.
It actually wasn’t his best performance of the year statistically, as he had three other games with more passing yards, one of which saw him complete a higher percentage of his passes.
However, it was the only time all year Fields played with unflappable confidence and it could have been a signature win if not for
an incredible lucky bounce landing right in DK Metcalf’s lap. This set up the long game-winning kick as time expired.
Clearly the performance was a significant outlier, but how does it stack up against some of the wackiest outliers in Jets history?
Let’s come up with an arbitrary top-10 list and then you guys can tell us what we missed and where we went wrong!
10. Stephen Hill: Rookie Sensation
Stephen Hill was one of the final draft busts of Mike Tannenbaum’s tenure as Jets’ general manager. The second round wideout ended up with just 45 career catches as he lasted just two years with the Jets and was soon out of the league altogether.
For one game, though, it looked like the Jets had found a difference maker. Hill caught five passes for 84 yards and two touchdowns as the much-maligned Jets offense stunned the Bills 48-28 in Hill’s NFL debut.
Hill was injury prone and displayed shaky hands over the rest of his career, although he did actually post a 100-yard game against the Bills in his second season so maybe this isn’t the outlier we remember it to be. Let’s call it the exception that proves the rule…
9. Josh Johnson’s flawless record
Josh Johnson has already had one of the wildest careers on record, having played for 14 NFL teams since being drafted in 2008.
He was with the Jets in both 2015 and 2021, but only got a shot to play meaningful reps once.
He played in the final three quarters of a 2021 game, after Mike White got knocked by the Colts and their head coach, current Jets offensive coordinator Frank Reich. However, Johnson passed for 317 yards and almost led the Jets within striking difference after they had trailed 42-10 late in the third quarter.
With the Jets down 15, Johnson had the Jets in the red zone with over a minute remaining, and a touchdown would have made it a one-possession game with a chance to go for an onside kick. A deflected pass was intercepted to end the threat but, for three quarters, Johnson had looked the part.
He didn’t get another chance with the Jets and then promptly put up another 300-yard game in his only start of the 2022 season with the Ravens. One 300-yard passing performance in zero starts as a Jet is an impressive ratio, though.
8. Brett Favre shows up
The Jets made a blockbuster trade to land Brett Favre in 2008, but it was a frustrating season for the Jets who never fully reached their potential.
Favre had led the Jets to an 8-3 record but they lost four of their last five to miss the postseason, amid reports that Favre was insisting on playing hurt and wasn’t very coachable.
The “real” Favre did show up once, though, in a wild and wacky week four game against the Cardinals. He ended up with six touchdown passes in a 56-35 Jets win.
That doesn’t remotely tell the whole story though, as it was really the Jets’ defensive front that dominated the first half. As outliers go, this game was next level, as the score was tied 0-0 after one quarter. However, the Jets took the Cardinals apart in the second quarter to lead 34-0 at the half!
The wackiness didn’t end there, though. Kurt Warner, who ended up with 472 passing yards, had the Cardinals back within 13 with three minutes still remaining in the third, so the game was not over, especially considering how easily they were moving the ball. While Favre and the offense kept them at arm’s length, the Cardinals got the ball back with over three minutes to go and a chance to cut it to a one-possession game, but a Jets turnover finally ensured they were out of reach.
Despite the six touchdowns, Favre fell short of 300 yards, a mark he never managed to hit with the Jets. In his other 15 games that season, he had just 16 touchdown passes and 21 interceptions.
7. Rex Ryan wins a low-scoring game
The Rex Ryan era was characterized by a team with a good defense and a shaky offense. Clearly it was designed to win low scoring games, like when they beat the Bills 19-13 in December 2009, or when the beat the Cardinals 7-6 in December 2012.
The crazy thing here is, during the intervening period – which lasted just two days short of three years – the Jets never actually won a low-scoring regular season game. Unless they scored at least 23 points in that intervening period, the Jets lost every time.
During those three years, the Jets did win two low scoring postseason games, and the next game after the streak was ended was also a low scoring win, but that Cardinals win was a major regular season outlier, even though it was just the Jets winning exactly the way they were supposedly designed to do.
6. Isaiah Crowell wipes the floor with the competition
As false dawns go, this one is tough to beat. After this game, the Jets seemed to have built an unstoppable offensive line, found a great running back tandem and looked to be well on the way to solving their quarterback issue. However, a few weeks later it was like it never happened.
The Jets beat the Broncos in week five of the 2018 season as Sam Darnold threw three touchdowns and New York improved to 2-3. The real story, however, was the running game.
Gang Green rushed for 324 yards with Bilal Powell carrying 20 times for 99 yards. However, that paled into insignificance compared with Isaiah Crowell’s output.
On 15 carries, Crowell racked up 219 yards, setting an NFL record for yards per carry. This included runs of 77, 54 and 36 yards.
He did this behind an offensive line that was comprised of Spencer Long, James Carpenter, Brian Winters, Kelvin Beachum and Brandon Shell.
The Broncos’ run defense wasn’t even that bad. They held their opponents under 100 rushing yards in nine of 16 games that year.
On the basis of this, and another convincing win the following week, the Jets looked to have their offensive line locked up for several years to come. However, their success evaporated almost immediately and all five were off the team by the end of the following season.
As for Crowell, he never reached those kinds of heights again either, averaging 3.4 yards per carry over the rest of the season and never playing in the NFL again thereafter.
5. Jaiquawn Polamalu
As Sidney Deane said to Billy Doyle in “White Men Can’t Jump”, the sun even shines on a dog’s [posterior] sometimes.
(Actually he strictly said “Even the sun shines on a dog’s [backside] some days” which strictly suggests that a variety of items had been shining on this particular dog, the most remarkable of which was the sun. However, such grammatical nuance was rarely a consideration among some of the 1990’s fiercest west coast basketball trashtalkers).
Digressions aside, has there ever been a more extreme example of a complete nobody having the game of his life out of nowhere than when Jaiquawn Jarrett took advantage of Calvin Pryor being late to a meeting and won an AFC player of the week award in 2014?
Jarrett led the Jets to a win over the Steelers with 10 tackles, a tackle for loss, a sack, two quarterback hits, two interceptions, two passes defensed and a fumble recovery. He was everywhere, and got to start for the rest of the season as a reward.
Having ended his career with nine career starts, Jarrett never got close to this kind of game otherwise. The 10 tackles represented a career-high and he never otherwise recorded a full sack, fumble recovery or interception in the pros.
Of course to be called a dog, or more specifically a “dawg” has a more positive meaning in modern football parlance. For one day at least, Jarrett was one of those.
4. Browning Nagle’s sparkling debut
Browning Nagle sadly passed away earlier this year, bringing back fond memories of an extremely brief feeling that the Jets had found their quarterback of the future at last.
There were high hopes for Nagle as he took over from Ken O’Brien as the Jets’ starter in 1992 and led the Jets to a 5-0 preseason record. The team had made the postseason in 1991 and Nagle rallied the Jets with a great performance in the opener.
The Falcons, playing their first game at their new stadium, held on for a 20-17 win, but Nagle looked to have proven himself as he passed for 366 yards and two touchdowns.
Incredibly, not only was that as good as it got for Nagle, who ultimately started 14 NFL games, but he never got anyway near that output again, failing to ever surpass 200 passing yards from that point onwards.
As for the 1992 Jets, they went 4-12, so they ended up with fewer regular season wins than they had managed in the preseason.
3. Vernon Gholston’s sketchy resume
Notorious 2008 draft bust Vernon Gholston famously never recorded an NFL sack, forced fumble, fumble recovery or interception. Had he done so, that play might have featured on this list.
Instead, let’s think back to the logic that got him drafted with the sixth overall pick.
Gholston was dismissed by some analysts as a very athletic player without the skill-set to succeed at the NFL level; an assessment which – with the benefit of hindsight – looks correct.
However, the Jets talked themselves into him being for real based on his college production and specifically his 14-sack final season. While his detractors protested that many of these came against inferior competition, or were of the clean-up variety, his entire reputation seemed to hinge on his three-sack performance against the Michigan Wolverines, which saw him primarily matched up with a top NFL tackle prospect and the eventual number one pick, Jake Long.
In terms of proving you can get the job done against NFL-level talent, that sounds impressive, especially when coupled with a highlight of Gholston beating Long clean for a sack.
However, Long – who was always a better run blocker than pass protector anyway – basically stonewalled Gholston on every other snap that day, with Gholston’s other two sacks coming against the right tackle, Steve Schilling. Schilling would go on to be a sixth round pick and was a journeyman guard at the NFL level, so beating him a couple of times was decidedly less impressive. It helped build a strong enough narrative for the Jets to select Gholston though.
That one play, where Gholston actually did beat an NFL-level starting tackle for a sack, was such an outlier that it was never repeated during his pro career.
2. Geno Smith is literally perfect
This one had to be in here, especially with Geno Smith making his return to the Jets in 2026.
The 2014 season finale in Miami may have been a meaningless game but Smith put up the best statistical performance of his career as he completed 20 of 25 passes for 358 yards and three touchdowns, with 221 of those yards going to Eric Decker. This translates to a perfect 158.3 quarterback rating.
Remarkably, Smith also had a game where he had a quarterback rating of 0.0 in the same season.
1. We’re No. 1
Finally, the biggest outlier in Jets’ history remains when they actually won the Super Bowl in January of 1969.
Basically, this has to remain top of the list until they can win another. However, after the events of this summer, maybe that doesn’t seem as impossible as it once did.
How did we do? Let us know if we missed anything in the comments…
