A legendary New York sports announcer was famous for frequently saying, “You can’t predict baseball.”
He was right. He also would have been right had he ever declared, “You can’t predict football.”
Who could
have predicted what played out on the field in Week 8 in Cincinnati? The Jets had a quarterback struggling so badly that he probably would have been benched had his backup not been too injured to travel with the team. He was without his two best wide receivers on a team with precisely one quality wide receiver.
So what happened? The Jets offense racked up 39 points and 502 yards.
The quarterback, Justin Fields, played excellent football, completing 21 of 32 passes for 244 yards and looking more confident than he had since a stellar Week 1 outing against the Pittsburgh Steelers.
There were certain things the Jets absolutely needed if they were going to win this game. One of them was a big rushing game. They got that to the tune of 254 total yards on the ground.
They also needed a bunch of different players to make timely plays. There wasn’t enough receiving talent at the skill spots to expect anybody to individually have a monster day. What the Jets needed was everybody to chip in when their number was called. Indeed, Tyler Johnson, Isaiah Davis, Jeremy Ruckert, Arian Smith, and Mason Taylor all had important receptions. Taylor’s was the biggest, the game winning touchdown on a halfback pass from Hall.
I think we know the Jets are a bad team. Even many of us who didn’t expect the season to go particularly well were surprised by the depths to which the team fell through the first seven games of the season.
It’s nice to have something to feel good about. It’s nice to be in the win column at long last heading into the bye week.
I think it’s also important for Aaron Glenn and this coaching staff. This group has taken a lot of heat, and a lot of it has been fair if we are being honest. Things don’t always go to plan for a new coach. Unfortunately for Glenn, little went right during the first two months of the season. The job was a lot harder than he realized, and the roster’s general lack of talent made things seem dire.
This Jets season, though, was never purely about the win-loss record. So much of the success or failure of this team is and will be based on trajectory. The Jets are in the middle of a youth movement. There are an inordinate number of first and second year players seeing big snap counts. Predictably, this has been the source of some of the team’s struggles. Perhaps the team’s youth and inexperience has accounted for a lower percentage of the Jets’ issues than Glenn would like to admit, but they have almost certainly accounted for a higher percentage than his biggest critics in the fanbase and media would be willing to concede.
By the end of the season, the team’s ability to play smarter, better, more fundamentally sound football or lack of it will determine whether 2025 is truly a success. If the youth on this team starts to blossom, it will be a sign that the Jets might have found their coach.
This game was anything but perfect for the Jets. They were playing behind for most of it, mainly because their defense could not get a stop. It was disappointing to see. Yes, the Jets were missing superstar cornerback Sauce Gardner, but their biggest problems seemed to be the way the Bengals were dominating their defensive line and linebackers.
Through the first seven weeks of 2025, the Jets always seemed to do enough to lose the game. If the defense was good enough to win, the offense would do just little enough to lose. In Week 1 when the offense was stellar, the defense couldn’t get a stop. In Week 3, when the Jets mounted a furious fourth quarter comeback, they needed one play to win the game. They couldn’t get it.
As I mentioned, there is more to progress than wins and losses, but wins are the most tangible sign of progress. On a pretty dismal day for the defense, the unit finally got two stops at the end of the game. One gave the Jets the ball back down by 6. They scored a touchdown to take the lead. The defense then needed one stop to close the game out. They got it. For once the Jets got just enough out of a struggling unit to win, not just enough to lose.
Only time will tell how this season plays out. For now it’s nice to just enough a Jets win for a change.
