Jets' hype at an all-time high entering much-anticipated season
Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers takes the field before an NFL preseason game against the Giants on Saturday. Credit: AP/Frank Franklin II
We all know what it sounds like out here in the clamor that surrounds these Jets. This isn’t just a team that has generated preseason buzz; with the start of the regular season fast approaching, they have managed to create a full-blown cacophony of noise that is building to a crescendo.
As they begin to be published this week (Newsday’s will be available Thursday!) just about every national preview, prediction, prognostication or piece of punditry has focused at least in part on a team that has, over the course of the past few months and in particular with the acquisition of Aaron Rodgers, made itself into the loudest story in the league.
While some already are engraving the Jets’ names into the Lombardi Trophy, others are pooh-poohing their place among the league’s elite.
Most of us, though, are just waiting to see what happens because it feels destined to be spectacular. That may be ticker-tape-parade spectacular, but it might be Hindenburg spectacular, too. The story of this Jets season will be written with caps lock on.
All of it just adds to the deafening ambient volume. Jet engines reach about 140 decibels at takeoff. This Jets team’s takeoff, as we taxi toward Monday night’s opener against the Bills, is approaching an ear-splitting level far above that.
But that’s all the outside noise, as they call it, folks like us chatting up the team and clamoring over its potential. As much as it pains a columnist to say so, it doesn’t actually matter.
As center Connor McGovern said of the hullabaloo: “It’s not something that you bring up in everyday conversation. You have to bring your hard hat and lunchpail every day. There is not a lot of time when you are sitting around to talk about that kind of stuff.”
What matters is what the Jets think and feel. What the Jets say not into microphones but when they are sitting around among themselves.
So what does it actually sound like on the inside? Behind the shields that have been built up to block the kind of babbling riot that can distract a team from its work?
Well, turns out, it’s pretty close to the same as out here.
It has a few less voices, sure, which helps to avoid the messy, overwhelming commotion, and definitely a lot fewer doubters mixed in.
The result is that it comes together like a beautiful choral arrangement rather than the messy pandemonium we produce.
“You talk to the players and they are all speaking the right language,” Robert Saleh said on Monday. “This is a cool group, man. They are completely locked in . . . I think this building is just working together in one voice, in one language, with one heartbeat. It doesn’t mean anything, but everything has been going pretty good so far.”
It’s at least refreshing that the Jets aren’t coyly suggesting an ignorance of what the rest of the world thinks about them. Some teams will do that, pretend to live in a vacuum. That may have been possible a generation or two ago, but these days, there are just too many ways for the waves of external stuff to breach the levee.
Besides, the Jets know what it is to live in silence. That was most of their post-Namath, pre- Rodgers existence.
“This is better than the alternative,” Saleh said of heightened expectations.
So rather than fight to ignore it, the Jets’ plan seems to be to join in.
That pleasing hum is a delicate equilibrium, though. Any little comment can set it askew.
The Jets bought themselves little cover from any of those outside expectations and targets that have been placed on them when cornerback D.J. Reed offered up, virtually unsolicited, the idea that this defense can be “historically” great and put itself in the conversation with the 1985 Bears and the Seahawks’ Legion of Boom crew.
Yes, their amp goes up to 11 in there, too. It might have been 12, but that number has been retired.
“I can speak for everybody when I say that we are ready to go out there and showcase ourselves,” defensive lineman John Franklin-Myers said.
Saleh said he feels the best protection from outside jibber-jabber becoming a problem is the deeply inherent sense among key players that they haven’t yet done anything to warrant all the preseason praise.
“There is just a mindset that I don’t think any of these guys look themselves in the mirror and say, ‘I’ve arrived,’ ” he said. “I think this is a group that knows we have to put in work. I think this is a group that knows every day is just as important as the next. I think this group is focused.”
It helps that, for the most part, that attitude is objectively accurate. There aren’t a ton of rings flashed around the building. Lest we forget, the quarterback who carries the heaviest onus for winning a Super Bowl with these Jets hasn’t been in the big game since he won his one and only appearance in it at the conclusion of the 2010 season.
“There are not many guys in this locker room who have been in this position no matter what team they’ve been on, to have a team this talented, this hungry and this eager to go,” McGovern said. “I’m extremely excited. I get excited every year to do this, but this one feels extra- special . . . Nobody wants to be the reason we waste this opportunity. Everybody wants to be the reason the team capitalizes on this opportunity.”
Pretty sound thinking.
Certainly a much healthier pastime than thinking about the pretty sounds.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
