Yes. It was supposed to be more than this. It was supposed to be better than this. It is the second week in December and the Jets were supposed to be playing for something other than lovely parting gifts. They were supposed to be fighting for playoff position, maybe jockeying for the top of the AFC East.
News bulletin: they are doing neither.
So perhaps it’s difficult to glean too many feel-good items away from the Jets’ most feel-good game of the year, a 30-6 schooling of the Texans which may have done some serious harm to Houston’s playoff hopes. The Jets had higher ambitions than playing the role of spoiler.
But spoilers they are.
And spoilers they were.
“That,” cornerback D.J. Reed said, “is as much fun as I’ve had in a long time.”
What the Jets confirmed Sunday afternoon at MetLife Stadium is that those who thought there could still have been something of this season after Aaron Rodgers went down weren’t hallucinating and weren’t simply looking at things through green-colored glasses.
On display Sunday was every happy reminder of why the Jets believed they would have been able to grind their way through their troubles — and, yes, a sad reminder that their inability to do so will gnaw for long after the season is over.
Yes, there was Zach Wilson, turning in the game of his professional life, 301 yards passing and two touchdowns, making the most of his latest second chance. And whenever the quarterback is playing like a professional quarterback, things are going to look a lot better, even in the midst of a driving rainstorm.
But everyone else played top drawer, too. There were the old reliables — the defensive line that registered four sacks and harassed C.J. Stroud all day, and the secondary, led by corners Reed and Sauce Gardner, who never allowed Stroud many windows of opportunity,
But there was also a jarring reminder that the Jets’ offense is equipped with two potentially devastating weapons. Breece Hall had 126 yards from scrimmage and caught one of Wilson’s touchdowns, and always seems to look one jab step away from going the distance. And there was Garrett Wilson, who was targeted 14 times — much to the disbelief and the joy of Jets fans everywhere — and caught nine of them.
“We finally got rolling a little bit today,” Hall said.
“It’s good to find a rhythm on offense,” Garrett Wilson said. “Finally.”
What’s remarkable about the Jets’ second-year receiver is that for all the belief that he’s either grossly underused or that the Jets’ quarterback rotation grossly underserves him, he now has 159 catches in his career — the most for any Jets receiver, ever, with four games left in his sophomore season.
“That’s what we want every game to look like,” Zach Wilson said.
That was the hope, sure, even after Rodgers disappeared four snaps into the season. Now, all the Jets can really hope is that Sunday was a sneak preview of what’s to come next year, assuming Rodgers can stay healthy, assuming the Jets can do something about an offensive line that was fine Sunday afternoon but can still look awfully shaky game-to-game.
It’s not what any of them wanted. It’s not what you wanted, if you are a Jets fan. It seems like the Jets play every year for the year — or years — ahead, and never for the year they’re actually playing in. But this is what they have now. This is who they are.
There are games like Sunday, when they simultaneously made you pine for what could have been and also ponder what could be.
“We have to take week-to-week,” Jets coach Robert Saleh said. “Don’t get too high and get too low, try to capture what it felt like on the field, in the booth, continue to find ways to get better. We have four more to make the best of it. We have a lot of young guys getting playing time.”
That wasn’t supposed to be the deal, no, not in this year, not with these expectations. You can look at Sunday and be depressed that it took 13 games to see one like that. Or you can swallow hard and hope it’s merely a preview. As a fan, do you really have a choice?
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