Can Jets or Giants give New York fans hope? Not likely!
New York Jets head coach Robert Saleh and New York Giants head coach Brian Daboll meet on the field after a preseason game at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, NJ, on Sunday, Aug 28, 2022. Credit: Brad Penner
The best thing about the annual Jets-Giants preseason game on Sunday was that it was the last preseason game of 2022.
A decent-sized crowd — for August — showed up at MetLife Stadium to witness the event, but everyone knew that all it really meant, pending injury updates, was that it brought us one day closer to the teams’ Sept. 11 openers.
That is when we will find out what we have here, and the smart money says we won’t have much, with both teams widely predicted to finish with losing records again.
Perhaps so. But here’s hoping the smart money has it wrong this time, because metropolitan-area football fans deserve something — anything — to cheer for this autumn.
New York’s lost decade of NFL football has become a joke and an embarrassment, an odds-defying debacle in which not one but two franchises cannot do anything right.
(Use this fun fact to amaze and horrify friends at cocktail parties: In 12 seasons at MetLife Stadium, the teams have combined to host one playoff game. One! Combined!! The Broncos and Seahawks, who met in Super Bowl XLVIII, each have played one more postseason game there than have the Jets.)
Having competent New York teams in other sports — I’m looking at you, baseball — has helped distract from the football pain, as has the fact that unlike in other sports, fans tend to pay avid attention to the NFL even when their local teams stink.
Still, it gets depressing.
Upon arriving in East Rutherford on a warm summer afternoon, I had a scary flash-forward to another cold, dark, dispiriting December of meaningless football at the big gray barn. Brrr.
So which of our local 11s is best positioned to prove the skeptics wrong and be competitive in 2022?
Oddsmakers have the Giants winning more games, partly as a function of their seemingly softer schedule. But projecting NFL schedule strength in August is an imprecise science.
It says here that the Jets are better and are the more likely team to provide holiday cheer in the weeks and months after the Yankees or Mets parade down Broadway.
Quarterback uncertainty aside, the Jets have impressive pieces and a coach in Robert Saleh who appears to be a keeper. If he makes it past his second season, he at least will outdo any recent Giants coach in longevity.
The Jets won Sunday’s battle of the previous preseason unbeatens, 31-27, to finish 3-0 in August, which means nothing whatsoever.
But their spirited play against the Giants illustrated the style Saleh has sought to foster.
That never was more evident than on the late first-quarter play on which Jets rookie Micheal Clemons — a budding fan favorite and general mayhem-maker — knocked Giants quarterback Tyrod Taylor out of the game with a ferocious hit.
It also was there when fourth-string quarterback Chris Streveler completed an excellent preseason by throwing two fourth-quarter touchdown passes, the latter with 22 seconds remaining to Calvin Jackson, and celebrated as if he had won a playoff game.
Shortly thereafter, he was in the Jets’ locker room telling Joe Flacco and Mike White how much he enjoyed working with them, given his precarious roster position and with final roster cuts coming this week.
Such is the strange nature of preseason football in which nothing is quite as it seems and everything is largely forgotten the minute the regular season kicks off.
Two months from now, there is a better chance than not that the Giants and Jets will be headed down another non-playoff path.
But it does not have to be that way. Will someone please make the losing stop? Been there, done that. It’s gotten boring.
J-E-T-S, Jets, Jets, Jets? Why not?
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.
