The Shakespearean Tragedy of the New York Jets Has Reached Its Climax
Adam Gase has accomplished football’s ultimate Pyrrhic victory.
The play? Third and six. Sam Darnold’s Jets have the ball, up 3 points against the Rams, with 2 minutes left, and a chance to win their first game of the season. Darnold snaps the ball and tosses it to Frank Gore for a short pass over the middle. Gore, who has managed 2.6 yards per carry this game, secures the rock and falls backwards over the first down line. The Jets get a fresh set of downs, and they run the clock out to secure their first victory of a vomit-inducing 2020 season.
Champagne bottles pop in Detroit and Cleveland. In New York, a very different type of drinking is going on.
Anyone remotely familiar with professional football will have heard the name “Trevor Lawrence” plenty of times throughout the 2020 season. Lawrence established himself as a historically great freshman quarterback in college, leading the Clemson Tigers to an undefeated season and handing the legendary Alabama football team their worst loss ever under Nick Saban. Again, Lawrence did this barely a year removed from being too young to vote. He led Clemson to another College Football Playoff National Championship game the following year, and will lead Clemson into the CFB playoffs once again in 2020. Every evaluation metric imaginable predicts unparalleled success for Lawrence, a show-stopping college quarterback considered by draft analysts to be the best college prospect since at least Andrew Luck in the 2012 draft.
Lawrence, the consensus best player in all of college football, would be chosen by any team lucky enough to pick first overall in the 2021 NFL draft. For almost all of 2020, that team was the New York Jets.
Adam Gase’s Jets were awful. Not just awful like most bad teams were awful, but legendarily awful. They were blown out game after game. They lost their first eight games without even sniffing a sustained lead. While every other team had won a game by week 6, the Jets were winless by week 12. Their starting quarterback bounced on and off the injury report, leaving the decrepit Joe Flacco to lead the NFL’s most impotent offense. Their defense, which had carried the team to a 7–9 record last year, ranked in the bottom five in both yards and points per game following the departure of Pro Bowler Jamal Adams. The Jets stank in ways few teams in history have stunk, drawing comparisons to historic athletic disasters like the winless Lions and Browns of years past. Week after week, the New York Jets subjected their fanbase to football so offensively bad a case could be made for censoring it.
There were numerous causes for the Jets failure, but the majority of the heat fell on head coach Adam Gase. Gase joined the Jets in 2019, after being fired by the Miami Dolphins, and made headlines almost immediately for the uncomfortable, bug-eyed visage he put forward in his opening press conference. The 7–9 record he finished with in his opening season was not the worst that Jets team could have done, but this subsequent 2020 season buried any hope that New York faithful could have had in a Head Coach half a decade removed from his only winning season. Gase’s awful playcalling (and dodging of the questions his decisions provoked) made him a clear frontrunner for being the worst NFL head coach in a season that featured two head coaches being fired before the football year was even half over. As the Jets’ season continued to slog inevitably forward, many Jets fans wondered how Gase still had a job after three head coaches with equivalent or better records had already been let go.
Other Jets’ fans, though, were happy that the off-putting Gase stayed at the helm of this awful franchise. Every awful loss, be it a horrific blowout at the hands of the Seahawks or a surprisingly close loss to the Chargers, brought the Jets ever closer to the shining prize of Trevor Lawrence. All the Jets had to do was keep losing, and the best quarterback prospect of the entire decade would fall into their laps. And no one could lose more consistently than the Jets.
No game enforced this mentality more than a week 13 matchup against the Raiders. The Jets had seemingly won, setting Las Vegas up in a situation where only a last second hail mary could win them the game. Yet, bafflingly, New York bucked traditional wisdom and decided against dropping everyone they could in coverage- and this decision allowed the Raiders to score a last second touchdown that assured Gang Green would stay winless. Defensive coordinator Gregg Williams was fired the next day, in an attempt to send the message that the team was not dropping games on purpose, but the unorthodox playcall felt like an assurance to Jets fans that New York was genuinely dedicated to losing, intending to tank so severely that no other team would even have a shot at Lawrence. For Jets’ fans, this was the only thing that pulled them through the worst season in team history. They would suffer through loss after loss, humiliation after choke, in order to get their hands on Clemson’s golden-haired gridiron god.
And then the Jets won.
Staring down a playoff team, facing one of the most dangerous defenses in football, the ever-maligned Gase somehow outsmarted football savant Sean McVay to lead the Jets to their first win of the season. The Jets now had the same record as the Jacksonville Jaguars, and due to a stronger strength of schedule, rose (or fell, depending on perspective) to second pick in the NFL draft.
In all my years watching football, I cannot remember a win that outraged a victorious fanbase quite like this.
It was almost poetic in a way. Gase had been the posterchild for awful coaching throughout all of 2020, even amongst the coaches who had been fired before the season was over. He had been the creative mastermind behind the worst laid plans of the season, to the extent that all Jets fans had to look forward to was the player their team would draft after he was gone. Jets fans were in agony, but they felt like it was agony with a purpose. They watched Gase pitch atrocities every week, finding new ways to lose, so that Trevor Lawrence would lead their franchise into a glorious new dawn. So that one of the greatest college QB’s ever would be the offensive centerpiece of their organization for decades. After 3 months of eating proverbial glass, the win over the Rams nullified all of that. It was like telling the most loyal of Christian missionaries that by no fault of their own, they would be spending eternity in Hell. Adam Gase, who was good at nothing, wasn’t even good enough at being terrible to be terrible enough for Lawrence.
As of now, the 1–13 Jaguars are the frontrunner for the first overall pick with 2 games remaining. Their first game is against a red-hot Bears team, clawing for a playoff spot and playing the most complete football they have all season. The second is against a 10-win Colts team with no clear weaknesses and hungry for revenge after Jacksonville scored their only win of the season against them in week one. The Jaguars are heavy underdogs in both games, and likely will be the only team able to select Lawrence come April.
Is the entire season wasted for the Jets? Not necessarily. Even if they lose out on Trevor Lawrence, both Zach Wilson and Justin Fields are excellent quarterback prospects in their own right. New York will likely have a great mold available for development under a coach not named Adam Gase going into 2021. Players like Marcus Maye and Mekhi Becton are great pieces for a future regime, and if New York wants to try and salvage current QB Sam Darnold they could trade down for a king’s ransom of draft capital. Nevertheless, the win is gut-wrenching for Jets fans. All fall, the Jets put their fans through misery with the promise of Lawrence at the end of a dismal season. In a tragic fashion that would put the ancient Greek playwrights to shame, Gase, in the eleventh hour, robbed Jets fans of even that. As a stunned Sean McVay watched the game clock cycle to zero, equally shocked Jets fans watched their chances of drafting their promised savior fall away, like sand through the hourglass.
