Jets Fans Chant "Sell The Team" After Another Disappointing Loss: Is This The Lowest Point In Franchise History?

Halloween night at MetLife Stadium, and with apologies to Robert Saleh, the mantra of the 2-6 New York Jets has devolved into:

ALL TRICK NO TREAT.

The Jets were granted six prime-time games because of Aaron Rodgers and the star power that accompanied him. They’re 1-3 in prime time heading into Thursday night’s game against the Texans at MetLife Stadium.

It is time for all of their stars to play like stars.

“The goal is New Orleans,” Rodgers said in the summer.

Super Bowl 2025 in New Orleans is in the distance right now. The goal is 3-6 right now.

Woody Johnson would love to make the argument that the Jets have the talent to make a Super Bowl run. Plenty of people who don’t own the Jets were making that argument before the season.

This ALL TRICK NO TREAT season.

The least they could do is give these poor fans that expected and deserved so much better a TREAT:

You, Mr. Rodgers, you go win the game in the fourth quarter with a two-minute drive if your team asks you for one.

You, Davante Adams, you remind us of the rare telepathy you have with Rodgers.

Stream the game live on Thursday night on Amazon Prime Video

You, Garrett Wilson, you have it in you to wreck the game with Adams’ presence getting you a lot more single coverage.

You, Breece Hall, be the dual-threat Beast you should be every single week now that play-caller Todd Downing seems interested in balancing out the offense.

You, Tyron Smith, you quiet the calls for first-round pick Olu Fashanu to replace you and start reminding people why you will be a first-ballot Hall of Famer, if you can.

You, Haason Reddick, you start making a better case for that elusive big-ticket contract than you did in your Jets debut against the Patriots.

You, Quinnen Williams, you be the dominating force you were against the Patriots (1.5 sacks) and get your tackle numbers (18 on the season) up where they belong.

You, Sauce Gardner, you improve your tackling and get your first interception since Nov. 6, 2022, against Josh Allen.

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You, D.J. Reed, you get your first interception since Nov. 24, 2023, against Tua Tagovailoa.

The Jets defense is 25th in takeaways.

“Our mindset hasn’t really been all about the ball as well as it needs to be,” cornerback Isaiah Oliver told The Post.

Jeff Ulbrich continues as interim HC and defensive play-caller.

“The biggest message was finishing, that was something that he challenged us with to be better at this week coming off of last week,” Oliver said. “Being more detailed, bringing more focus late in the games especially. Not only starting fast, ’cause that’s something that you always want to do, but finishing strong, more emphasis on that more so than starting fast. Obviously you want to do both all the time, but you definitely can’t win a game unless you finish the right way.”

C.J. Mosley weighed in with a similar message.

The Jets schedule is forgiving. For the Jets fan still clinging to hope, that oppressive 13-year playoff drought isn’t 14 just yet. Anybody can beat anybody and anybody can lose to anybody in this league. For now, the goal isn’t New Orleans. The goal is 3-6.

“Focus on doing your job and don’t try to be a superhero,” was the gist of Rodgers’ postgame message to his team Sunday.

C.J. Stroud won’t get to throw to Nico Collins or Stefon Diggs. Sometimes it’s not who you play, but when you play them.

ALL TREAT NO TRICK on this Halloween night. NYJets.com Contributor

It's not easy being in green and white these days, particularly for the vets who have taken a few laps around the NFL calendar. The Jets fell to 2-6 with their fifth straight loss at New England on Sunday, and now they have to get right back on the horse and take on a tough Houston team at MetLife Stadium on Thursday night.

But while Thursday games aren't generally NFL players' favorite day to pop pads, TE Tyler Conklin thinks the upcoming TNF affair could help the Jets top the Texans and ride onto the winning trail again.

"I guess the one bright spot would be that we've got a game in on Thursday night," Conklin said about the 25-22 loss to the Patriots. "And we've got no other choice but to kind of flip the script and get back and figure out how we're going to win this game.

"I think it's a good opportunity to go get a really bad taste out of your mouth."

Maybe Conk is onto something. The Jets' second and most recent victory this season came in their solid season-opening Thursday night home game against the Patriots. And over the years, when the Jets have won one Thursday game, they tend to win the next one as well. They won three in a row on TNF from 2008-10 and two straight against the Bills in 2016-17.

However, the Jets also have fought Thursday losing streaks of five and six games in that span, so there are no guarantees for an offense and a team that Conklin said are still sorting out the details that have led to their recent malaise.

"After every game you look back like, Damn, what? Especially these close games we've had," he said. "And I guess the one thing that comes to mind is just shooting ourselves in the foot with the little things. Whether it's penalties, presnaps, holding, whatever it may be. It just seems like in a crucial moment we make mistakes that you can't make when you want to win games in this league."

Conklin doesn't excuse himself from examining his own miscues and finding answers to cure them, but he's been making some strong contributions to try to bring those W's about. With 26 catches for 240 yards, he's on pace for a 55-catch, 510-yard season, which, with a few more explosive plays like his 27-yard snare from Aaron Rodgers over the deep middle to start the fourth quarter at Gillette Stadium, could have him back in personal-best territory.

Then there are the touchdowns. He has gone from a 32-game TD drought that began in his first season with the Jets in 2022 to grabbing his second short scoring strike from Rodgers in two games. Another one against the Texans would put him in select company. Only three Jets tight ends since 2000 have caught TD passes in three consecutive games:

But feelgood touchdowns are not foremost on Conklin's mind. Neither is throwing in the towel.

"All you can do is wake up, go to football, prepare, go to meetings, prepare, go to practice, prepare," he said. "Go out there, put your best foot forward as an individual, as a unit, as a team to win. Two-and-six isn't where you want to be or where we thought we'd be. But the last thing we're going to do as individuals or as a team is quit on it."

Especially with the bright lights of Thursday night and the 6-2 Texans just around the corner.

The Jets have had a lot of rough seasons but this year might take the cake.

After having so much expectations with Aaron Rodgers being healthy and most of their defensive starters returning, the New York Jets season has been a nightmare as the team sits at 2-6 and Aaron Rodgers looks completely washed.

During Thursday night’s game against the Houston Texans and the team struggling to move the ball, Jets fans throughout MetLife Stadium were wearing paper bags and a loud “Sell The Team” chant broke out.

“Sell the team” @woodyjohnson4 @nyjets pic.twitter.com/2VWlS4PKdJ

"SELL THE TEAM" chants audible on the broadcast. pic.twitter.com/mXAA2Uk0AS

#Jets fans wearing paper bags, booing the team while chanting “Sell The Team.”It’s October in a supposed Super Bowl-or bust season.A Hall of Fame QB. A roster loaded with supposed All-Pro talent.Yet this feels like arguably the lowest point in the organization’s history.

This is the lowest point in Jets history and they’ve had a lot of low points. It’s a quote famously uttered by Bill Parcells, who not-so-coincidentally happens to be the only multi-season head coach in New York Jets history with a winning record.

“You are what your record says you are.”

It’s a lesson that some New York Jets fans must heed at this point in time.

The Jets are 2-6. Yet, some fans still cannot escape the logic that the Jets – the same Jets who currently own the AFC’s 15th seed and the 2025 draft’s 4th overall pick – are somehow just a few hairs away from being one of the top teams in the AFC.

Their logic is fairly simple. Four of the Jets’ five losses in their current losing streak were by one score. In three of those four losses, Greg Zuerlein’s missed kicks were worth enough points to make up the difference between a win and a loss. In the other loss (vs. Minnesota), the Jets’ offense actually outscored the Vikings’ offense, but a rare Aaron Rodgers pick-six was the difference.

If Zuerlein just made his kicks and Rodgers doesn’t make that one mistake against the Vikings, the Jets would be 6-2 right now!

This. Logic. Does. Not. Work.

As a fan, it is easy to get caught up in the consequences of your own team’s self-inflicted errors while forgetting that the other team committed them, too. If you’re going to go back and flip a mistake the Jets made, you have to flip one the opponent made. And once you do that for each game, you realize the Jets probably should have lost, anyway.

Zuerlein missed a game-winning field goal in the Jets’ 10-9 loss to Denver. But he never would have had that opportunity if Denver’s Wil Lutz did not already miss a field goal on the previous possession. Had Lutz made that field goal, the Jets were all but cooked. Not to mention, it’s absurd to claim the Jets had any business winning a game where they could not score a touchdown at home despite their defense allowing negative passing yardage in the first half.

Rodgers’ pick-six may have ultimately been the difference against Minnesota, but the Jets still got outplayed throughout the game. They let the Vikings come out and bury them into an early 17-0 hole, lost the turnover battle, and played atrociously on offense, going three-and-out seven times and only scoring touchdowns on two possessions that were already set up for them in Vikings territory. The Jets got outplayed and deservingly lost.

Sure, Zuerlein missed two field goals in a 23-20 loss to Buffalo where the Jets actually played fairly well and deserved a chance at the victory. But you cannot talk about Zuerlein’s misses without also mentioning that Buffalo’s Tyler Bass missed a field goal and an extra point. In a hypothetical world where you could reverse all of those missed kicks and retroactively give both teams their points back, the Bills would still win, 27-26.

Then, the Jets got embarrassed on prime-time in Pittsburgh in a game that felt like a must-win. It was their second blowout loss of the season, giving them two blowout defeats to a measly one blowout win (coming at home against a miserable team that proceeded to beat them later). The Jets’ lack of blowout wins puts them at the mercy of too many nail-biters. They seemingly had the talent to win games decisively, but it is clear by now that they are nowhere close to capable of running away with victories on a routine basis.

This week, the Jets lost 25-22 in a game where Zuerlein missed a field goal and an extra point while New England did not miss any kicks. It is extremely easy to look at the final score, add the four points lost via Zuerlein’s kicking, and say the Jets would have won if they had an average kicker.

But if we’re going to sit here and say the Jets would have won if Zuerlein made his kicks, then we can also claim the Patriots would have had the game wrapped up early if their receivers did not drop countless potential big plays in which the Jets’ secondary left them wide open. Furthermore, Drake Maye was cooking the Jets before his injury, and when he left the game, the Patriots essentially sat on the ball for the rest of the first half. If Maye did not get hurt, it is easy to picture the Patriots running away with the game.

Above anything else, it is baffling to blame a kicker for the Jets losing to a 1-6 team that had lost four of its past five games by 16+ points. In no world should that game have come down to one, two, or even three field goals. The Patriots are an openly awful team that hardly gave their maximum effort to win the game. Even they don’t believe in their ability to win. At the end of the first half, the Patriots got the ball back with 1:51 on the clock and essentially decided to milk the remaining time instead of trying to score, drawing boos from the crowd. The Jets could not defeat that team.

The Jets are 2-6 and they deserve to be 2-6. The notion that you can go back and flip results because of missed kicks is faulty, ignoring that both teams can go back and reverse mistakes that cost them points.

People tend to point to missed kicks as game-reversing mistakes because it is easy to recognize their impact, as kicks directly translate to points, but those kicks make up such a minuscule portion of the impactful plays throughout the game. The offense and defense make countless mistakes throughout a game that indirectly cost the team many more points than the kicks. It’s just that the impact of those mistakes is subtler than that of a missed kick.

There is no question that Greg Zuerlein is partially responsible for the Jets’ 2-6 record, but he is a much smaller part of it than some fans would like to admit. In each game where his kicks contributed to costing the Jets a win, the Jets were arguably the second-best team on the field, anyway.

Parcells said it: You are what your record says you are.

We can spend all day analyzing the coin-flip moments on a team’s schedule that could have flipped victories. We can try to judge a team’s “true” quality based on their on-paper talent, film, and analytics. But Parcells’ famous quote will always ring true.

I, perhaps more than anyone, prefer to analyze teams by their performance in totality (via metrics like point differential and DVOA) rather than their win-loss record, but even I cannot deny the unbeatable weight of the almighty standings. At some point, winning is a skill. Even if you are consistently in close games, if you usually find a way to lose, then you probably just aren’t good at winning – simple as that.

Even if we do want to dive deeper and try to evaluate the quality of the Jets’ cumulative performance this season beyond their win-loss record, it is difficult to claim they “should” be any better than a 3-5 team at best. They have a -2.2 SRS (Simple Rating System), a Pro Football Reference metric that adjusts point differential for strength of schedule. That ranks 22nd. They also have a -14.6% DVOA, which ranks 25th.

Pro Football Reference’s system has the Jets with 3.4 Expected Wins, while the DVOA system has them at 2.6 Expected Wins. Average those totals together and you get precisely 3.0 Expected Wins between the two systems – a 3-5 record.

So, sure, it is fair to say that a 2-6 record might be underselling the Jets a little bit, and that 3-5 might be a more accurate representation of their performance this year. Therein lies a more accurate way to look back at a team’s missed opportunities to win close games.

You cannot go back and give a team every close game, but you can regress their close-game “luck” (although finishing close games is arguably a skill) to the mean in games that went down to the wire. The Jets are 1-4 in one-score games. We’ll remove the Patriots game from that sample since it was an utterly inexcusable performance that by no means deserved a victory, so we can say they went 1-3 in “respectable” one-score games. Flip one of the two losses to a win, and now you have an even 2-2 record in close games where the result could have gone either way. Now they’re 3-5.

So, congratulations. The Jets are not “really” a 2-6 team. They’re more like a 3-5 team. Whoop-dee-do.

It is pointless to use Zuerlein’s missed kicks or any other near-miss opportunities to try and flip the Jets’ losses into victories as a way of showing they are not actually a bad team. They are definitively bad, no matter how you slice it. Suggesting the Jets “should” be anything better than 3-5 is vastly overselling the way they’ve played this year.

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Follow us on X (Formerly Twitter) @jetsxfactor for all the latest New York Jets news, Facebook for even more, Instagram for some of the top NY Jets images, and YouTube for original Jets X-Factor videos and live streaming. By jasperc October 27, 2024 11:45 pm

By jasperc |

	October 27, 2024 11:45 pm ET

Jaiden Tripi/Getty Images

The truly insufferable pain of being a New York Jets fan is something special that not everybody is forced to endure. However, if you grew up a fan of the New York Jets, at some point you’ve gotten used to the pain. Today after watching the team lose to the 1-6 Patriots in a must-win game, my mom looked at me and asked “Why are you still a fan of this team?” To be honest, I couldn’t tell you. This team makes me want to rip my heart out so they can’t break it again. I’ve seen things in my life that I’ll never be able to get over. Moments that will stay with me for the rest of my life.

For the rest of my life, I will remember where I was and the emotions that I felt when things happened, and I am only 17. At 17, I have never seen my team play in the playoffs with my own eyes. I don’t remember a time when the Jets were good. To me, players who were truly special involved, Bilal Powell, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Brandon Marshall, Eric Decker, Robby Anderson (he wasn’t chosen yet) and Marcus Maye (who knows where he is now). That is a criminally bad list of players who were great and cherished Jets.

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Being a Jets fan is the worst because it lifts you as high up as it can before dropping you to the ground and crushing you. My first experience of this was in 2016. This is probably the worst my heart has ever been stomped on. In 2016, the Jets were a special team. Free Agents Brandon Marshall, Ryan Fitzpatrick, and Eric Decker, came together and changed everything. This team was a different gravy. After losing to the Texans in Week 11, everything came together. The Jets won five straight. We were winners! The best memory for me as a Jets fan was against the Patriots when Brandon Marshall went absolutely nuts and helped by a Revis interception, the game went to OT. In a moment that I will remember forever, the Pats declined the ball and gave it to Fitzpatrick who, on the second play of OT, hit Quincy Enunwa for what, I believe, was a 65-yard catch and run.

I remember all of this like it was yesterday. Then Fitzpatrick threw a back shoulder ball to Eric Decker for the win! And the stadium went nuts. I was hugging people I’ve never met, and it was one of the best memories of my little nine-year-old life. But then in week 17, after beating the 12-2 Patriots to get to 10-5, the Jets folded, and behind three fourth quarter interceptions from Ryan Fitzpatrick, the 7-8 Bills beat the Jets ending their season at 10-6 and missing the playoffs. First of all, how often does a 10-6 team miss the playoffs? But then how does Fitzy throw three picks, something he would never do! Yet the same old Jets, they throw away another season. Then all Jets fans endured seven straight seasons of depression before 2023. In 2023, we got Aaron Rodgers and everything changed. People wanted to play for the Jets. Hell, our depth chart was looking Super Bowl-bound! But then Rodgers goes down. Then Zach Wilson beats the 5-0 Eagles and I get to stick it in all my Philadelphia friend’s faces.

Then we beat the Giants. 4-3. I don’t even know how we’re here, but we are doing it. And then everything crashes and burns and the Jets miss the playoffs again. This brings us to this year. The Jets should be dominating these teams, but our MVP quarterback looks like a high schooler and our interim head coach can’t handle being the defensive coordinator and head coach and the defense is falling apart. Another season of everything being over before December. I just want to fire everybody.

Being a fan of the team should be fun. It should be rewarding. Every team has a reward. But when you are a Jets fan, nothing is good. Hope is just an illusion, it isn’t real. I wish that I didn’t have to spend my entire young life going to every home game and rooting for a team that loses every week. I wish my dad didn’t waste his money buying season tickets that he’ll never make a profit on because the Jets can’t win. I wish that my team could just make the playoffs at least once with all the talent, we have. But when you are a Jets fan, wishes don’t come true.