The New York Giants will play their third and final game of the 2026 preseason against the New York Jets at MetLife Stadium on Friday night. The Jets will serve as the home team in this annual affair, which over time has become known as The Snoopy Bowl.
This meeting was once an event that New York football fans looked forward to. Bragging rights and pride were at stake. But time has whittled away at this once-heated rivalry, which began way back in the mid-1960s, when the AFL began to challenge the NFL in stature and popularity.
The game is now a formality. Just another preseason game. The Giants and Jets have drifted away from each other over the decades. Sure, they share the same market and stadium, but to each other, they mean very little.
The game this Friday will mean more for the players who are trying to make the 53-man roster of each team than it will for the players who are already on those rosters.
The history doesn't go away, though. Older fans remember those preseason games, which began back in 1969, when the Jets and Joe Namath owned New York. The Giants had crumbled, much like their surroundings at the old Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. The Jets were the new, shiny object that had just dethroned the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III, which had made the AFL-NFL merger a certainty.
From Mike Vaccaro of The New York Post:
That was the weekend of Woodstock, and the battle for New York City was actually fought in New Haven, Conn., and the Jets beat the Giants 37-14 in a game both teams took very, very seriously.
There were other notable clashes — 50 years ago this month came the last NFL game ever played at Yankee Stadium, the Giants winning a 16-14 snooze-fest that was delayed two days by Hurricane Bell, so it was played on a Wednesday.
Mostly, the teams just hope to escape this last weekend of pretend games unscathed, since the lasting memories of the more recent renewals generally revolve around devastating injury. Mark Sanchez and Chad Pennington had their Jets careers altered in this game. Jason Sehorn and Osi Umenyiora both cost themselves entire Giants seasons thanks to bad luck in the game.
This game will likely feature players the two teams won't miss should they get hurt or injured. It will be played primarily by backups who are fighting for their professional lives. The final score won't matter as it did in decades past.
Maybe one reason is that both franchises have become an embarrassment to both themselves and their fan bases. At this point in history, there is little pride on either side.
The Jets have not appeared in the postseason since 2010, the longest current drought in North American team sports. They have a record of 85-160 since 2011, the third-worst in the NFL over that span behind Jacksonville and Cleveland. They have finished last in the AFC East in eight of the past 12 seasons.
The Giants haven't fared much better. Since winning Super Bowl XLVI in February of 2012, they've been about as bad as a franchise can be, both statistically and optically. They have qualified for the playoffs just twice since then, and were eliminated both times quickly. For the most part, they have languished in the NFL dungeon, losing 10 or more games in 10 of the last 12 years. Every move they've made to improve seems to have backfired.
MetLife Stadium, the flavorless, multi-billion-dollar steel-and-concrete palace the two clubs chipped in on back in 2011, has become a house of horrors for both. The fans aren't too thrilled, either.
Players complain about the surface, which has ended and altered careers. The parking and transit situations are a nightmare. The venue, one of the most active and sought-after in the country, is quiet football-wise.
There have been just two postseason games played there. The Giants hosted the Atlanta Falcons en route to their Super Bowl XLVI win in 2012. Two years later, the Seattle Seahawks defeated the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII.
Although both the Giants and the Jets believe they are on the upswing, fans won't believe it until they see it. They won't see it on Friday night, however.
This article originally appeared on Giants Wire: Has New York Giants vs. New York Jets lost its novelty?
