I hate to say it, but I wanted to see the Jets lose in Week 18 to the Buffalo Bills.
It was only partially dude to positioning in the NFL Draft. Of course, as a result of the 35-8 loss combined with the Giants’ win over the Cowboys, the Jets did clinch the number two overall pick in the 2026 NFL Draft. A win would have dropped the Jets by a couple of slots.
There was more to it, though. Over the years I’ve seen the Jets sell false hope over and over based on meaningless late season wins.
The Jets used
a couple of narrow wins over bad opponents in 2019 to validate their decision to give Adam Gase a second season. In 2023 pulling out fourth quarter victories over bottom three opponents Washington and New England allowed the Jets to pound their chests over winning 7 games without Aaron Rodgers.
At the start of the season, I felt that how the Jets finished the season would likely be more important than how they started. This was a young roster full of players who were likely to struggle at the start of the year. Perhaps these game reps that resulted in early struggles would produce results in December.
Of course we saw how the season played out. The Jets traded two of their three stars at the deadline. The third spent the second half of the season on the sidelines injured. There were other injuries to key players. By this game, the Jets weren’t fielding an NFL caliber roster.
Still, I find the way the Jets finished the season difficult to defend. The personnel situation was ugly. You couldn’t expect many wins. In fact, you would expect the team to get blown out a fair share. All of this should be acknowledged.
At the same time the Jets weren’t the first team in history to have a thin roster decimated by injury. There are other teams pressed to putting practice squaders on the field in late season games.
Yet the Jets made history through their thorough lack of competitiveness.
I don’t care who you are. There’s no excuse to get annihilated like this week after week after week. There was never a ray of light anywhere in the last month of the season.
The roster might have been dismal, but the Bills played their backups in this game. Are we to accept that losing by 27 points to Buffalo’s B team is the best the Jets could do? Is it all right that the Jets made Mitchell Trubisky look like Josh Allen?
I know the cynics will say that the Jets were subtly executing a tank.
It doesn’t say good things about a team when people assume you were tanking because it isn’t possible to be that bad organically.
I have to question the premise as well. After all, the Jets wouldn’t have needed to tank so glaringly in order to lose games. There are also some pretty clear signs that it wasn’t a tank. Take the nonsensical timeout Aaron Glenn called near the end of the first half. It served no purpose to win or lose the game. The most logical explanation to me is that Aaron Glenn is in over his head generally speaking and it shows itself in moments like this where he lost track of the game situation.
This roster doesn’t just need work. It needs a complete reconstruction.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure how anybody can trust that this coaching staff is capable of successfully overseeing such a reconstruction.
It can be difficult to separate talent issues from coaching issues. I do have to ask a question, though. Where is the value added by the coaches?
I don’t see any area where this team is better than it would be without the current coaching staff. Would the Jets be losing by 50 instead of 27 if not for Glenn’s coaching? I tend to doubt it.
The depths this team sunk to are frankly unfathomable. The Rich Kotite Era is generally viewed as the low point in modern Jets history. Kotite’s 1996 team lost by an average of 11 points per game. Glenn’s team in 2025? They lost by 11.9 points per game.
I don’t know what Glenn or his coaches do well. I don’t know how you can bring them back and expect things to get better. I don’t know how they can be trusted to take on such a monumental roster overhaul.
During this game, we heard an old standby of any failed Jets coaching tenure. During a blowout, the game announcers recalled speaking to Glenn during the week and were told that despite the team’s performance, there is a plan to improve. I think I have heard a version of this from every failed Jets coach right at the point it was clear their career with the team was circling the drain. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard it in year one before.
As usual, the Jets are asking us not to believe our lying eyes and trust the people in charge. As usual, we are being told that things will turn around once the people in charge are able to use the assets they have stockpiled.
It doesn’t sound like any change is in sight so I guess we have to hope for the best.
Glenn and his coaching staff certainly haven’t done anything to provide real confidence so hope is all we have.
