Zach Wilson's benching was a product of Jets' unfortunate decisions
Jets quarterback Zach Wilson meets with reporters after the team's NFL game against the Bills in Orchard Park, N.Y., on Sunday. Credit: AP/Jeffrey T. Barnes
It probably won’t be better, but at least it will be different.
At this point in a Jets season that has mostly consisted of heads banging against walls over and over again at the plight of an ineffective offense and the player who, fairly or not, most embodies its failures, that’s probably the best anyone can hope for. Zach Wilson is being replaced by Tim Boyle.
Same head, new wall.
Boyle isn’t going to save this year. Neither will Trevor Siemian, the practice-squadder who Robert Saleh said will be the No. 2 option in Friday’s game against the Dolphins, if he gets a chance. And counting on Aaron Rodgers to return at any point in the next month, given the state of the team and the risks that would be associated with an early comeback from his Achilles injury, is, as Saleh pointed out Monday, “moot” until actual doctors sign off on it.
No, the quarterback who could have salvaged this season for the Jets remains out there somewhere, playing for another team or still awaiting the call to come in and help.
The chance to truly do something about all of this mess was way back in September when the organization chose to remain idle in the immediate wake of Rodgers’ downfall. Judging from Saleh’s comments in announcing this current quarterback swap on Monday when he bemoaned never giving Wilson the chance to have a “redshirt year” sitting behind a functioning quarterback and his spiral toward this current point of career oblivion as he wraps up his third NFL season planted on the bench, the Jets always seemed to know that Wilson wasn’t up for this year’s challenge.
Saleh called Wilson’s trajectory “a series of unfortunate events."
Unfortunate for Wilson? Perhaps.
Unfortunate for us? Undoubtedly.
Unfortunate for the Jets? No way. This mess is much more their own fault than Wilson’s. More like a series of unfortunate decisions than events.
Rodgers getting hurt on the fourth play of this season was wildly unlucky. That was the only unfortunate part of this story. Never forget that just everything before and since was either miscalculation or a blatant mistake.
They’re the team that drafted Wilson second overall (which, for the first time on Monday, perhaps in an act of self-preservation with the occupational grim reaper lurking in the building, Saleh hinted at objecting to by saying “I have my thoughts and I’ve shared them with Joe [Douglas]” but declining to elaborate on them). They’re the team that handed him the starting job as a rookie (Saleh, also on Monday, noting that “hindsight is 20/20” on that decision he was part of). And they are the team that threw Wilson back out on the field to replace Rodgers this year and wrought this inevitable point in the franchise’s tortured narrative.
“I think they were walking a fine line trying to believe in and show trust in Zach Wilson and doing what’s best for the football team,” former Jets quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick, now an analyst for Amazon Prime’s NFL coverage, said Monday of the team’s inaction in September and October.
Doing what was best for the football team lost out.
Fitzpatrick said he was a proponent of the Jets making a trade. He wanted them to go after Jameis Winston. Kirk Cousins and Ryan Tannehill were other potential targets. The Vikings got Josh Dobbs from the Cardinals for practically nothing when Cousins tore his Achilles in late October and it has so far saved their season. Then there were the free agents: Colt McCoy, Carson Wentz and Chase Daniel. Most other teams that suffer significant injuries to their starter make moves unless they already have an established backup, too.
Not the Jets.
“I think if they wanted it, there were probably some guys available and they stuck with Zach,” Fitzpatrick said. “In watching the way that he performed, they thought there was some progress and unfortunately it just hasn’t really gotten to the level where he’s been able to win them a lot of games.”
The result is a comeuppance of sorts for Amazon Prime, which will carry Friday’s Jets game against Miami, and an ounce of revenge for everyone who has ever felt bamboozled by an online purchase that looked great on the website but was nothing close to the promised product once delivered. Amazon thought it was getting Rodgers and a big game in the Big Apple with playoff implications to launch their Black Friday foothold in the NFL’s schedule.
Instead, they’re getting Boyle, his 0-3 record as a starter, and his three career touchdown passes with nine interceptions. They’re getting the 4-6 Jets.
They should have checked on the NFL’s return policy for these things before putting this game in their cart.
Amazon will be fine. Wilson probably will be, too. He’s young, richer than most, and has enough raw talent that someone else will give him a shot at rehabbing his career. Maybe he’ll have to wait a few years, but he could become the next Geno Smith.
The real losers in this scenario are those of us deprived for the second straight year of getting to see just what this otherwise talented team might be able to accomplish if it had even mediocre quarterback play going for it.
It’s hard to envision the Jets being much better with Boyle than they were with Wilson. It remains far too tantalizingly easy to envision them being significantly better with any of the handful of other quarterbacks out there who might have helped … if only the Jets had been open to pursuing one.
“We all agree we wish it were better,” Saleh said.
Too bad those who could have done something to prevent it didn’t.
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.
