This New York football season feels potentially special
Head coach Robert Saleh of the New York Jets looks on during the second half against the Miami Dolphins at MetLife Stadium on Sunday, Oct. 9, 2022 in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Credit: Jim McIsaac
Sure, New Yorkers like football. It would be un-American not to.
But it has been a baseball town for more than a century and a half now, one with a romantic soft spot for basketball.
Football? It matters, maybe just not in the way it does in most burgs.
Even now, the fact that the Giants and Jets are a combined 7-3 is a subplot to the Yankees being in the playoffs and the Mets no longer participating in them.
But this promising start does feel different from others, and this football season does feel potentially special.
Why?
Because absence from the NFL playoffs makes the heart grow fonder, and the past decade has been such a local football flop that even one feel-good overachieving team would be a godsend, let alone two.
There is a long, long, long way to go here, of course. Both teams are underdogs Sunday, with the Giants hosting the Ravens and the Jets visiting Green Bay. But what if both won? At that point, there would be no choice but to take them seriously, even beyond the end of the Yankees’ season.
The two local 11s do not even seem to be rooting against each other.
Jets coach Robert Saleh logically would have preferred to see the Giants lose to the Packers in London, simply to avoid facing a ticked-off opponent this Sunday. But he said he likes to see other New York teams do well. (He said he was pulling for a Yankees-Mets World Series, even though he grew up a Tigers fan.)
On Friday, he was asked if he could take anything away from the job Giants defensive coordinator Wink Martindale did against Aaron Rodgers and the Packers last week, and he said this:
“He did a really nice job with his game plan, getting Aaron off the spot and all that . . . I thought their offense did a really nice job. They had two big, big drives that took up almost a quarter and a half.
“So really good complementary football, especially coming out of the second half. So a lot of respect for them. They did a great job.”
The Giants are unlikely to take anything positive out of the Jets’ Week 1 performance against the Ravens, however. Baltimore won that one, 24-9.
The Jets are 3-1 since then, including 2-0 with Zach Wilson at quarterback.
At the moment, neither of these teams looks like a serious Super Bowl contender, although stranger things have happened.
But that is a discussion for December and January. For mid-October, it does not get any better than this for local football fans.
The second-class citizen thing has deep roots around here. The football Giants, remember, are named after a baseball team that left New York for San Francisco in 1958.
On the very day the football Giants announced their existence, Sept. 9, 1925, at the Hotel Alamac on Manhattan’s Upper West Side — a block from Babe Ruth’s bachelor pad at the Ansonia — that news garnered modest attention in The New York Times.
It appeared under a banner headline the next morning about a 5-4 Yankees loss at Fenway Park in which Ruth’s lazy fielding allowed Boston to score a walk-off win.
Throughout his account, Times correspondent James R. Harrison ripped the man he referred to as “G. Herman,” including this:
“The Babe was a perfect picture of a man not in a hurry. He jogged across the foul line with clumsy slowness. He reached for the ball with snail-like deliberation.”
Yikes! Ruth had a tough year in 1925, as did the Yankees overall. You could look it up. Two years later, they went 110-44 and won the World Series, which got a tad more attention than the Giants’ first NFL title after an 11-1-1 finish.
The Giants’ last two victories that season were shutouts of a crosstown NFL rival — the New York Yankees.
Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.
