Failure to Launch: All Momentum From Winning Streak Gone in Jets Loss
It is over.
All the momentum, all the positivity of the New York Jets season is now gone after a 22-6 loss at the Cincinnati Bengals. As if the scoreline wasn’t bad enough it was the way they played – the Jets got thoroughly tossed around on both sides of the ball in handing the Bengals their first win of the season.
It is humiliation upon humiliation.
And that the Jets have done that now twice this year is what makes Sunday’s loss in Cincinnati all the more worrisome. For three weeks, the buzz was that the Jets had improved and made strides, that the losses and lumps of their 1-7 start to the year were worthwhile because they had come together and were not only developing but starting to finish games.
Now…well, now the Jets are once again a mess. They are directionless. Completely and utterly without momentum. Twice this year, winless teams have played the Jets and beaten them. This isn’t an eyesore game. It is now a trend.
It is a Jets team that has reverted back to being the Same Olds.
“We just, we didn’t play well,” head coach Adam Gase told the media in post-game press conference.
“Flipping the field killed us. The fact that we stayed backed up the whole time, we never gave our defense a chance to really tee off on these guys. We just didn’t do a very good job on offense.”
It doesn’t mean that the Jets are hopeless or the rebuild doesn’t have any traction. What it does mean is that essentially no matter what the Jets do for the rest of the season, short of closing out with four straight wins, will not be enough to whitewash this horrendous loss.
One loss to an 0-7 Miami Dolphins team in Week 9 is excusable. Blips happen, nearly every team in the NFL has at least one bad loss at some point during the season. The parity is there to make that happen and the Dolphins have played well since that win over the Jets.
But now to not only give the Dolphins their first win of the season but now also make the Bengals 1-11 is downright humiliating. There is now way to spin this. This was a game the Jets were expected to win. After all, the Bengals are the worst team in football.
Gase, when asked in his press conference the mood of the locker room, didn’t try to sell optimism. He couldn’t this time.
“It’s quiet, what do you expect?” Gase told reporters. “We didn’t come here to lose.”
And in becoming the first team to lose to the Bengals this year, the final boxscore stings more than just the record in the standings. This one hurts because it is really about perception. The Jets were going to sell this winning streak this offseason to free agents as proof that they are heading in the right direction. The pitch was that they aren’t far away from being playoff contenders and the run of wins this second half of the year would prove it.
They were supposed to extend this win streak to beat the Bengals. Then it was conceivable that next week, they could push it to five straight wins in a revenge game against the Dolphins. Now, it almost doesn’t matter from the outside if this team wins or loses next week.
Now, they have to use these final four games not to prove that they are inching towards not just competitiveness but now respectability. A win is no longer expected from any of their remaining games.
The momentum, simply put, is gone.
It is the end of the rainbow, ever so fleeting, that gave the Jets and fans hope that something was being built, that gold laid at the end in the form of a team that could make the playoffs someday. That dream is shelved, perhaps to see the light another day.
