If Thursday night is any indication, the lone team to actually train and play its home games in New York state is not only the best team in New York state, it’s the best team in the entire NFL.
The Buffalo Bills’ 31-10 drubbing of the defending Super Bowl champion Los Angeles Rams cemented the Bills’ status as the favorites to finally raise the Lombardi Trophy in February. The Bills’ odds at BetMGM went from +600 on Wednesday to +500 by this morning.
Of course, as we all know despite basic geography courses telling us otherwise, the New York Giants and New York Jets are identified with the Empire State even though they’ve shared a stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. since 1984 — eight years after the Giants moved their headquarters to the Garden State and 24 years before the Jets followed suit by moving from Hofstra University on Long Island.
But the Bills don’t have to worry about their sort-of neighbors offering any sort of resistance on the way to State Farm Stadium in Glendale, AZ, the site of Super Bowl 57. If you are a downstate NFL fan feeling particularly optimistic as the Giants and Jets prepare for their season openers Sunday, placing $5 bets on the Giants (+6600 to win the NFC at BetMGM) and the Jets (+8000 to win the AFC) to advance to the Subway Super Bowl would net a payout of $740.
Alas, there are other things you can do with your ten dollars, like not set them on fire.
The Giants and Jets will be looking to break an ignoble tie with one another Sunday, when their seemingly never-ending rebuilds continue with games against the Tennessee Titans and Baltimore Ravens, respectively. The two New York/New Jersey teams are tied for the worst record in the NFL since 2017 with 22-59 marks.
In a sign of just how bad things are for the Giants and Jets, there are seven Sundays this season in which they are both scheduled to play in the 1 PM window — a scheduling quirk that was unimaginable in the before times, when one team at 1 and another team at 4 or later was guaranteed to draw eyeballs in both windows in the nation’s largest television market.
The stretch of five straight losing seasons is the longest simultaneous run by the Giants and Jets since the Jets debuted as the AFL’s Titans in 1960. The previous standard-bearer, such as it was, occurred from 1975-77, when the Jets went 3-11 in three straight seasons and the Giants sandwiched their own 3-11 finish around a pair of 5-9 performances.
Only two other squads — the Denver Broncos and Washington — enter 2022 having suffered five consecutive losing seasons. The Broncos appear ready to return to relevance in the turbo-charged AFC West this season following the acquisition of Hall of Fame-bound quarterback Russell Wilson.
The Giants and Jets have slightly more optimistic long-term outlooks than Washington, but that’s the very definition of faint praise considering the rotten-to-the-core nature of the Commanders and doesn’t obscure the fact there’s not an immediate exit route from the worst professional football era downstate New York/upstate New Jersey has ever seen.
In the modern NFL, a team that doesn’t have a quarterback doesn’t have a path to contention. And the quarterbacks who will steer the Giants and Jets out of their swampy messes are almost certainly in college — or high school.
In hiring former Bills assistant general manager Joe Schoen as their GM and former Buffalo offensive coordinator Brian Daboll as their head coach, the Giants have invested some hope in the belief two of the men responsible for Josh Allen’s meteoric rise can perform similar magic on Daniel Jones, who has exhibited some Allen-like skills since he was drafted by the Giants in the first round of the 2019 draft.
Jones is one of six quarterbacks to rush for at least 1,000 yards since 2019 (Jones is at exactly 1,000 yards) and his yards-per-carry average of 5.8 yards ranks third among signal-callers who have made at least 10 starts in that span. He’s also shown admirable toughness by playing through or quickly returning from ankle and hamstring injuries before suffering a concussion and a season-ending neck injury last season.
But Jones also ranks 37th in quarterback rating (84.3) and tied for 37th in average yards per attempt (6.6) since 2019. It’s not all his fault — former general manager Dave Gettleman all but ignored the idea of constructing an offensive line while spending the second overall pick of the 2018 draft on running back Saquon Barkley and spending $40 million guaranteed prior to the 2021 season on Kenny Golladay, who is most assuredly not a no. 1 wide receiver — but the odds of Jones developing into a franchise quarterback are not good.
And most head coaches don’t hitch their wagons to quarterbacks they didn’t draft and develop. The Giants have already declined the fifth-year option on Jones’ rookie contract.
The likeliest outcome in the short- and long-term is backup Tyrod Taylor — who, in an ironic twist, directed the Bills to their first playoff berth in 17 seasons in Sean McDermott’s first year as head coach in 2017 but was subsequently traded to the Cleveland Browns to make room for the rookie first-rounder Allen — supplants Jones at some point this season before the Giants look to find their franchise player in the quarterback-rich 2023 draft.
The Jets, fresh off back-to-back praiseworthy drafts, probably have a more talented roster than the Giants. Among the 13 former first-rounders on the roster is second-year quarterback Zach Wilson, who was selected by the coach and general manager for whom he plays. The Jets have a handful of exciting first- and second-year players at the skill positions on offense as well as Sauce Gardner, already the best shutdown cornerback they’ve had since the halcyon days of Darrelle Revis and Antonio Cromartie.
But the Giants have the good fortune of playing in a mediocre division and a conference in which the best quarterbacks are much closer to receiving their AARP cards than they are removed from their college graduations.
The Jets? They have lost 12 straight games in the AFC East, a division that should be ruled for the foreseeable future and beyond by Allen. And they play in a conference with Allen plus— deep breath here — Lamar Jackson, Joe Burrow, Patrick Mahomes, Justin Herbert and Russell Wilson, along with wild cards such as Mac Jones, Tua Tagovailoa, Trevor Lawrence, Derek Carr and the disgraced Deshaun Watson.
In other words, the road to contention for the Jets — whose six straight losing seasons and 11-season playoff drought are the longest such streaks in football — is a treacherous one even if Zach Wilson is the franchise quarterback they’ve been searching for since Joe Namath jogged into the Orange Bowl tunnel wagging his pointer finger in January 1969.
And there’s been little evidence so far he’s the guy. While Zach Wilson’s 6.4 yards per carry last season ranked first among quarterbacks who made at least 10 starts, he was, as Kyle Odegard noted in his Optimist Alley piece on the Jets this summer, a bottom-three quarterback by almost every other traditional and advanced metric. Wilson was 30th or lower in the NFL in yards per attempt and quarterback rating as well as DVOA (defensive-adjusted value over average) and CPOE (completion percentage over expected).
This seemed like a good idea until I reached the Jets. I said some mildly nice things about them, but yeah, they stink, and will for a while, unless Zach Wilson morphs into Josh Allen 2.0.https://t.co/1OVjr88UXI
— Kyle Odegard (@Kyle_Odegard) August 1, 2022
Zach Wilson’s second year could not have started any more ominously. His first series of the preseason opener against the Philadelphia Eagles on Aug. 12 ended with a telegraphed interception. His second series ended with Wilson suffering a torn right meniscus and a bone bruise while inexplicably trying to scramble for extra yardage. Wilson, who missed four games as a rookie with a sprained right MCL, is expected to miss the first three games of the regular season.
Starting cannon-armed but statue-esque 37-year-old Joe Flacco against three of his former AFC North rivals behind an offensive line already being held together by duct tape and paper clips might be enough to jump-start the tank-a-thon for 2023, when as many as four quarterbacks could be taken in the first 10 picks.
Would the Jets have enough guts to declare Zach Wilson a sunk cost, a la the Arizona Cardinals with rookie Josh Rosen once they secured the no. 1 pick and the right to select Kyler Murray in the 2019 draft, if they are positioned to select another quarterback in the upper reaches of the first round?
By that point, the Bills might be the defending Super Bowl champions and a potentially budding dynasty. The loyalty displayed by the Giants and Jets to the state of New York — and vice versa for their fans — is understandable.
The Giants are the Big Apple’s football version of the Yankees, a tradition-rich franchise whose fans view rooting for the team as something to be inherited and passed down through the generations. And a championship parade down the Canyon of Heroes for the long-suffering Jets would be surpassed in euphoric boisterousness only by a parade celebrating a Knicks title.
But if ever there was a time to switch Empire State allegiances, it’s now. Otherwise, to borrow a phrase from another team that used to call New York home, it’s wait ’til next year. And probably the one after that. And probably the one after that. And probably the one…
