It was 1978 and a lawyer named Peter Valentine, a Giants fan, was the one who hired the plane to fly over the Meadowlands with this message: “15 Years of Lousy Football – We’ve Had Enough.” Fan protests are generally like the old line about the weather, everybody talking about it but nobody ever doing anything about it. But this became one of the most famous protests in sports history, at least around here.
Now it’s all this time later, and the Meadowlands is once again a capital of lousy football, for both the Giants and the Jets, coming off a Sunday in Germany and in the Arizona desert – desert being an appropriate spot for the Jets, right? – that is as much a bottoming-out as anything that has happened for either team since the Giants last won a Super Bowl.
When that banner flew over Giants Stadium, the Giants were playing what would be their 7th losing season out of the last eight. The current Giants are on their way to their 7th losing season out of their last eight. And out of the 15 seasons that Peter Valentine’s banner spoke to, the Giants had four teams that didn’t finish with a losing record. Since the last Super Bowl in Indy, over the Patriots, the Giants have had four non-losing seasons.
So with them, to be fair, we’re working on 14 seasons of generally lousy football that did include two playoff appearances, though as Giants fans know, each of those ended up with the Giants eventually getting their doors and windows blown out.
The Jets? The Jets haven’t played a postseason game since the AFC Championship against the Steelers in Jan. of 2011, the year before the Giants won that second Super Bowl off Belichick and Brady and them. And in the last 14 seasons THEY’VE played, they’ve had exactly one winning season and their combined record is 83-141, 58 games under .500, which is starting to look like Aaron Rodgers’ actual age.
Giants fans, in their hearts, and Giants’ fans have great ones, knew their season was over after that loss on their opening Sunday, at home – where they still haven’t won a game this season – against the Vikings. It took longer for Jets fans to come to the same conclusion, this past Sunday against the Cardinals, when they got rolled by the Cardinals as much as any team in the league has gotten rolled this season. Rodgers barely threw for 151 yards, couldn’t produce a touchdown, the Jets couldn’t run the ball and couldn’t stop the run and couldn’t tackle and made Kyler Murray look like Patrick Mahomes.
“They were not prepared to play, we didn’t execute even close to our standard,” Jets interim coach Jeff Ulbrich said.
Everybody in the room was too polite to ask this followup question:
What standard?
When it was mercifully over, though, you wanted to ask Ambassador Woody, the owner of the team, if he still thinks this is all Robert Saleh’s fault. And then you wanted to ask him if he still thinks this is the best Jets team he’s had in 25 years.
The only positive thing you can say about the Jets of Ambassador Woody and Mister Rodgers is that they aren’t as bad as the Giants are, now that the Giants couldn’t even beat the Carolina Panthers on Sunday in Munich. It wasn’t too long ago that we thought the Panthers were the worst team in all the land. Or two lands. Or any land. Silly us.
Another ugly season for the two teams playing their home football in that ugly gray bowl known as MetLife Stadium. The Giants have no idea who their quarterback is going to be next season, because if there’s life on Mars, even they know that the Giants are finally going to move on from Daniel Jones after six seasons. And why should we think that the Jets, after what they’ve seen out of Rodgers, their own heart’s desire, that they won’t move on from him, rather than bring him back in the season when he will turn 42 after what they’ve seen in the season during which he’ll turn 41 in three weeks?
But guess what? This Jets season is no longer an Aaron Rodgers story, despite the fact that we all got the idea over the past year or so that the Earth would stop spinning on its axis if we went more than a couple of days without some kind of Rodgers story. This isn’t about Joe Douglas, the outgoing general manager, or the interim coach. This is all about the owner, who has once again turned the New York Jets into a dumpster fire by looking completely out of his depth.
“We’re going to kick…..you can fill in the word,” Ambassador Woody said after he fired Saleh.
What the ambassador meant to say is that they were going to get their fill-in-the-word kicked.
They are nowhere. Again. Looking to start all over again. Again. John Mara said this about Joe Schoen and Brian Daboll not so very long ago: “We are not making any changes this season and I do not anticipate making any changes in the offseason either.” Only that was before the Giants got passed by the Panthers in the overall standings. Like they say in that TV commercial, life comes at you fast.
So here everybody is. The Giants have the worst record in the league along with the Jaguars. The Jets are one game better and you know what the real football season is in New York and New Jersey? Looking ahead to the draft. You know when popularity for the Google search “2025 NFL draft” spiked in New York area for Giants fans? After Week 1. With the Jets, it wasn’t until they lost in London to the Vikings.
The Giants haven’t won a game in a month. The Jets have won one since the end of September. Another season of lousy football. Pretty soon it will be 15 for both of them. And counting.
