Cardinals 31 Jets 6: The 2024 New York Jets Are a Bunch of Gutless Quitters

In all of the years I have written for this website, this is probably the largest gap between the end of a game and the publishing of my game recap. There’s a reason.

After last night’s game I was so angry with the way the Jets played, that I decided I needed to cool down. I was on the verge of calling the Jets gutless quitters. I felt like I should sleep on it and calm down. I’m not a big fan of writing provacative, click baity headlines like that.

Here’s the thing. I woke up today and felt exactly the same. You know what? Sometimes the provocative comment is accurate. I saw a team of gutless quitters on the field yesterday in Arizona.

This has been a frustrating Jets season. The team and the media vastly overrated the roster’s talent before the season started. Old players the team depended upon have shown steep decline. The Jets have fallen far short of expectations. This is a really bad team.

All of these things deserve to be examined. All of these things should frustrate the fanbase.

None of these things make the Jets THAT different from the rest of the league, though.

Half of the teams in the NFL currently have a losing record. A lot of those teams also had big expectations before the season. It’s easy enough to talk yourself into the best case scenario for your roster in the spring and summer. It’s rare that things play out that way after the season actually starts.

The Jets have taken a lot of low percentage bets over the last two years constructing their roster. If they had panned out, things could have turned out great. But what has happened cannot be totally unexpected. Since the spring of 2023, the Jets’ team building philosophies have been the polar opposite of what the best teams in the NFL do. They have essentially leaned into every failed roster building concept of the last three decades.

This happens. People running teams get desperate. They think they are closer than they really are. Sometimes owners overstep their bounds and force the team to execute bad ideas.

The Jets might have taken it all to an extreme. In his best days, Woody Johnson was a shaky owner. Over the last few months, we have seen a 78 year old guy who seems to be losing it in front of our eyes make erratic decision after erratic decision.

Again, though, this happens. Teams lose games. Hyped teams disappoint. Aging players decline rapidly. It’s easy to act like this is a singular failure that can only be explained by bad luck. In reality, it is a common failure brought on by bad choices. Of course we should be angry. Of course we can examine these things. But at some point I think you have to come to peace with the idea the Jets are just a bad team.

We thus can’t expect the Jets to win a lot of game.

What we certainly should expect, however, is for a team of professional football players to show some sort of professionalism when they take the field.

Maybe I’m too old school on stuff like this, but I think even in a lost season, a team owes it to its fanbase and the league to give a good effort. If you mail in a Week 17 or Week 18 game in a lost season because your eye is to vacation, maybe I can understand it.

I can’t understand or accept the total gutlessness we saw on that field in Arizona. The Jets acted like a bunch of players or coaches who just didn’t care. They wasted 3 hours of their fans’ weekends to collect paychecks.

It’s a mark against everybody. Jeff Ulbrich was thrown into an impossible situation, but I don’t think it’s much to ask for him and the rest of his coaching staff to get the players to act like they care a little.

I can’t only blame the coaching staff, however. These are professional football players. They are getting paid handsomely to take the field and give some sort of effort. It doesn’t take much to show some sort of gap discipline in the run game, avoid 20 missed tackles, or display some sort of passion for the game. If the big name players don’t want to do the bare minimum required to compete, I hope the Jets will cut and/or bench them. Bring up some practice squaders. Those guys can just as easily lose by four scores, but they’ll at least care and act like they care they are in the NFL.

Quality football might be too much to ask for at this point. A team that isn’t a bunch of gutless quitters shouldn’t be. Unfortunately that’s what we currently have in the Jets locker room.