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This time a year ago, there was genuine giddiness on either side of New York’s football aisle.
Jets fans were drinking in every ounce of Aaron Rodgers’ weekly adventures on “Hard Knocks,” dreaming of all the possibilities to come. Giants fans were basking in the glow of 9-7-1 and a playoff win, bursting with belief in the partners of the football dream factory of Schoen & Daboll.
It took four plays for the Jets’ optimism to go belly-up, at precisely the moment that Rodgers’ Achilles folded up like a lampshade and he staggered to the turf. And even as bad as that was, Jets hopes of a charmed season lasted longer than the Giants’ did, since just over 24 hours earlier on the same field, the Cowboys had toyed with Big Blue on the way to rolling them, 40-nil.
One more football season that felt like it died before the last day of summer. The two teams combined for 13 wins. By the end of the season it was hard to remember even one of them. By the end of the season, Giants fans were left to root for the Jersey kid, Tommy DeVito, to try to keep his Jeremy Lin imitation going as long as he could.
By the end of the season, Jets fans who’d giggled watching DeVito try to beat them in late October with essentially the Navy playbook of run left/run right/run up the gut were wishing they’d be able to have DeVito on their side, given the state of the quarterbacking they’d been forced to watch week after week after Rodgers vanished.
“We have higher expectations around here,” Brian Daboll conceded when the Giants’ 6-11 season was mercifully mercy-killed, though they did enjoy one last laugh kicking the Eagles when they were down in Week 18.
“This isn’t acceptable,” Robert Saleh said after the Jets’ slog was halted at 7-10, after an eerily similar final-week rock fight at New England in which they finally managed to beat Bill Belichick again.
There should be higher expectations around here, and what we’ve mostly gotten really isn’t acceptable — even though, with a couple of exceptions by the Giants, that’s been precisely what we’ve come to expect from the New York football season across every moment since the Giants won their second of two Super Bowls against the Patriots in February 2012.
So this year comes with a little less giddiness by the folks who follow the green, and there’s a lot less basking from the faithful who mostly don blue vestments as summer bleeds to autumn.
For the Giants, it’s understandable. The Giants, after all, while never publicly admitting as much, are now deeply engaged in the kind of break-it-down, build-it-back-up rebuild that should have been on the docket last year but was postponed because they couldn’t just toss those 10 wins from the year before off the G.W. Bridge.
Maybe Daboll has some tricks in store for us. Maybe the NFC East really turns out to be the Baltic Avenue of the NFL the way it looks like it might with the Eagles in decline, the Cowboys in descent and the Commanders relying on a rookie quarterback to show them the way. Maybe this can be 2020 all over again when Washington won it with seven wins.
Lots of maybes. But it would be wonderful if the Giants had a surprise in store for us.
Mostly, though, there are the Jets, who aren’t just a “now” team and aren’t just a “right-now” team but are basically a now team in real time. Rodgers is back, and he’s looked superb in training camp … but by the time he takes his first snap in Santa Clara on Monday night it will be exactly 364 days since his last one. And we all know how that worked out.
But they also have on their side, on that side of the ball, two players — Garrett Wilson and Breece Hall — who went flying off the board early in just about every fantasy football draft conducted in recent weeks. They have what ought to be a significantly improved offensive line. And there is a stout defense that, for two years, has fought the impossible fight of trying to make the reality of deplorable quarterback play disappear.
Yes, the Jets need Rodgers to stay upright for a minimum of 15 games, if not for all 17. Yes, things will look a lot different if Alijah Vera-Tucker or Hall or any of the stalwarts on D go down again, and of course it would be nice if Haason Reddick ever decides to join the party.
But for now, they seem the best bet to make New York football watchable again. If the Giants can grind their way to seven or eight wins, still be playing meaningful games in late December? Even better. It looks good in the early hours of September, both sides of the aisle. The early hours of January are what’ll matter, though, to say nothing of the journey from here to there.
