Jets can finally stop pretending they’re not a terrible team after loss to Colts

Surely, the pretending is over now. There’s no way to spin what happened Sunday. No way to act like it’s possible so salvage something out of this terrible season, because the Jets have shown everyone exactly what they are to anyone who has the stomach to continue watching: a terrible, terrible football team.
The Jets had the Colts beat on Sunday afternoon, and it didn’t matter. They still found a way to hand it over to the Colts. Aaron Rodgers was terrible early and worse when it mattered most, after the Colts took the lead in the final minute, with no timeouts, he panicked and threw the ball backward for a fumble, letting valuable seconds tick off the clock, and then he got sacked on when he couldn’t get sacked, letting time run out on the game and on the Jets’ season.
Colts 28. Jets 27. The Jets are now 3-8.
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No, we’re not going to talk about the playoffs, even if it’s mathematically possible, it’s not plausible. Not when the Jets had the game in hand, leading 27-22 with about three minutes remaining, only to let Anthony Richardson, the struggling second-year quarterback who was benched for Joe Flacco, drive 70 yards for a touchdown in six plays to take the lead. Not when Sauce Gardner, who is supposed to be their best defensive player, gave up the biggest play of the game, a 39-yard pass to Colts receiver Alec Pierce just before the two-minute warning, that set up the game-winning touchdown. Even if Jalen Mills and Gardner looked to have a miscommunication on the play, that just can’t happen. But it did to the Jets.
We shouldn’t be talking about the Jets being toast at this juncture of the season. And we wouldn’t have been had the Jets won games that they should have won earlier in the year against the Patriots and Broncos.
Had they taken care of business then, they would have been 5-6 now and able to withstand an ugly, ugly afternoon like this. But it turns out those terrible losses weren’t aberrations. They were proof what a disaster this Jets team is.
And the proof has been evident all along, including early on Sunday afternoon. The Jets somehow got themselves back into the game after a disastrous start, two touchdowns in a span of less than three minutes surrounding halftime.
But everything before that stretch served as overwhelming proof of what this team is: a football team that isn’t very good or very consistent. And had they played better, early, perhaps the Jets wouldn’t have needed any late game heroics to get the job done.
The offense failed to get a first down in its first five drives of the game. The only other team to do that this season is the Broncos, who did it against the Jets in Week 4 and came back to win.
The Jets offense was so thoroughly inept in the first five possessions of the game — including a failed fourth-and-1 where they direct snapped to tight end Tyler Conklin instead of handing the ball to one of their capable running backs — that it’s malpractice to imagine a world where their poor play wouldn’t cost them dearly against a better team.
If the Jets needed that long to get going against the 29th ranked defense in the NFL, what’s going to happen when they’re going up against a team with some sort of talent and organization instead of a team that went back to Richardson, a few weeks after benching him?
It’ll probably look a whole lot like it did last week against the Cardinals, when the Jets lost 31-6 in a game that was over before halftime.
Yes, the Jets can stop pretending now. The only place they’re headed after the bye week is to an early vacation.
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Andy Vasquez may be reached at [email protected].