The Jets are a team that specializes in unfulfilled promise. The promise of the 2023 season was Aaron Rodgers's arrival, and was dashed the moment his Achilles tendon rolled up the back of his leg in the season opener. The start of this season brought even more promise: While Rodgers was out last year, the rest of the Jets' roster cohered into one of the league's more talent-rich outfits, and it wasn't hard to imagine a team that went 7-10 with Zach Wilson starting most of the games suddenly becoming a force after Rodgers reclaimed his position. A 2-3 start put a damper on things, but also opened the door for promises to be made. It was a coaching problem! With Robert Saleh shitcanned and Nathaniel Hackett stripped of his play-calling duties, the Jets would finally—finally!—be ready to transform into the great team their roster says they are supposed to be. Monday night's game against the Bills was a great opportunity for the Jets to finally start making good on some of those promises.
Did we see a transformed and re-energized Jets team on Monday night? Well, the offense looked better than it had. Todd Downing's play-calling opened some running lanes for Breece Hall that were previously hard to come by, and Rodgers had his best game as a Jet, throwing for 294 yards and two touchdowns. But is a team that is about to turn the corner one that loses 23-20 to a sputtering division rival at home? Is a team that has ironed out its inefficiencies one that nets one touchdown from four red-zone drives, gets repeatedly run over by Ray Davis and Ty Johnson, misses two field goals, and commits 11 penalties? The Jets under Saleh were a team that dropped way too many passes, drew way too many flags, and routinely undid itself with mistakes of all varieties. Our first look at the post-Saleh Jets indicates that this is still a team that drops way too many passes, draws way too many flags, and knows just how to undo itself with stupid mistakes.
The big fuck-up from Monday night's game was a holding penalty on Tyron Smith that negated a walk-in touchdown by Braelon Allen. Backed up to the 14, Rodgers threw an incompletion on third down, and then Greg Zuerlein doinked the field goal attempt. A drive that features first-and-10 at the opponent's 12 and ends up returning 0 points can be chalked up to rotten luck. This kind of thing has been happening often enough to the Jets over the last few years, however, that each instance becomes harder to read as anything other than the result of incompetence.
Even after all of that, though, the Jets were still in a good position to win the game. Down three with just under four minutes to play, the ball was in Aaron Rodgers's hands. He told reporters after the game that this was the type of game he was brought to New York to win. When Rodgers signed with the Jets, fans were probably not imagining too many one-score games ending with him tossing an underthrown interception.
And there the game ended, on one more mistake, one more poor choice or fine detail missed. When asked about the play during his postgame press conference, Rodgers implied that his throw was so bad because he thought that Mike Williams was running in one direction as he began his throwing motion, and then tried to alter the flight of the ball at the last second.
Rodgers finished the game with 294 passing yards, meaning that he still has not eclipsed the 300-yard mark in a single game since Week 14 of the 2021 season. Any form of belief in this Jets team has always been undergirded by the assumption that Rodgers, at age 40, is still one of the best quarterbacks in the league. He looked the part for a bit last night, even hitting one of his patented Hail Mary touchdowns to end the first half. But the enduring image of this game will be that of Rodgers limping up and down the field after taking one too many hits, and then sending everyone home with a panicked pass to the other team.
But hey, the good news is that there are always more promises to make. This morning, the Jets traded for Davante Adams. Once he and Rodgers get back on the field together, the NFL better watch out. This is a team that could go all the way to the top!
