In all the years I’ve written for this website, this is probably the biggest gap between the end of a game and the publication of my game review. There’s a reason.

After last night’s game, I was so angry with the way the Jets were playing that I decided I needed to cool down. I was about to call the Jets cowardly quitters. I felt like I should sleep on it and calm down. I’m not a big fan of writing provocative, clicky headlines like this.

Here’s the problem. I woke up today and felt the exact same way. You know what? Sometimes the provocative comment is justified. I saw a team of cowardly quitters on the field in Arizona yesterday.

This has been a frustrating Jets season. The team and media vastly overestimated the roster’s talent before the season started. Old players the team depended on have shown a sharp decline. The Jets are falling far short of expectations. This is a very bad team.

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

None of these things make the Jets THAT different from the rest of the competition.

Half the teams in the NFL currently have a losing record. Many of those teams also had big expectations before the season. It’s easy enough to imagine the best-case scenario for your spring and summer selection. It’s rare for things to go this way after the season actually starts.

The Jets have used a lot of low percentages when building their roster over the past two years. If they had intervened, it all could have ended wonderfully. But what happened cannot be entirely unexpected. Since the spring of 2023, the Jets’ team-building philosophies have been the opposite of what the best teams in the NFL do. They have essentially adopted every failed roster building concept of the last thirty years.

This happens. People who run teams become desperate. They think they are closer than they really are. Sometimes owners overstep their bounds and force the team to implement bad ideas.

The Jets may have taken it all to the extreme. In his best days, Woody Johnson was a shaky owner. In recent months we have seen a 78-year-old man who seems to be losing it before our eyes, making one bad decision after another.

But again, this happens. Teams lose games. Hyped teams disappoint. Older players are declining rapidly. It’s easy to pretend that this is a one-off failure that can only be explained by bad luck. In reality, it’s a common failure caused by poor choices. Of course we should be angry. Of course we can investigate these matters. But at some point I think you have to settle for the idea that the Jets are just a bad team.

So we can’t expect the Jets to win many games.

What we can certainly expect, however, is that a team of professional football players exhibit some form of professionalism when they take the field.

Maybe I’m too old fashioned about this kind of thing, but I think even in a lost season a team owes it to its fan base and the league to put in a good effort. If you’re sending in a Week 17 or Week 18 game in a lost season because your eye is on vacation, I might understand.

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

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

However, I can’t just blame the coaching staff. These are professional football players. They are paid handsomely to take the field and put in some kind of effort. It doesn’t take much to show some kind of gap discipline in the run game, avoid twenty missed tackles or show some kind of passion for the game. If the big names won’t do the bare minimum necessary to compete, I hope the Jets cut them and/or bench them. Pick up a few practice squads. Those guys could just as easily lose by four scores, but they at least care and act like they care that they’re in the NFL.

Quality football may be too much to ask at the moment. A team that isn’t a bunch of cowardly quitters shouldn’t be. Unfortunately, that’s what we currently have in the Jets locker room.