In Comeback Win, Jets Showed Some Guts After Disappointing Loss Last Week
It was a character moment from the New York Jets, who rose to the occasion this past Sunday in a 22-21 win over the Miami Dolphins. What this comeback win showed was a team that is resilient and doesn’t understand how to quit.
For a team that is very much in a rebuild and is far from a finished product, the fact that the Jets showed a measure of backbone in their Week 14 comeback win is the tip of the iceberg.
Yes, the win lifts the Jets record to 5-8, already an improvement from their four-win totals over each of the last two seasons. There was more to this game however then simply a meaningless win, especially with the Jets coming off a terrible loss in Week 13 at the Cincinnati Bengals, a team that was the consensus pick as the worst squad in the NFL. That loss was doubly devastating as it also snapped a three-game winning from the Jets that had this team and its beleaguered fan base believing that they finally had some momentum to this rebuilding project.
All that seemed gone with the loss to the Bengals.
And yet here, in beating the Dolphins, a team the Jets had lost to in Week 9, New York did a nice job of bouncing back and not letting the disappointment of last week’s underwhelming showing against a previously winless team deter what they had built over the past month.
“Anytime that you lose a game when you're in the middle of winning a few in a row it's not the best feeling in the world. I know guys where really disappointed last week, I thought they did a great job of refocusing on Wednesday, came out practiced well Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, were really focused,” Jets head coach Adam Gase told reporters on Monday during his daily press conference.
“I think guys have done a good job of just focusing on one week at a time and not really listening to anything outside of that and that's the best way that these guys should go about it because it gives us the best chance to win on Sunday or a Thursday. I do think that these guys understand, it's all about opportunity and there's a lot of guys getting opportunity right now and we're trying to build things in the right direction and just keep trying to get better week to week.”
Gase spoke at the Jets facility as his team gets ready to face the Baltimore Ravens (11-2) on Thursday night.
Turning the corner seemed like a distant reality this time a week ago. All momentum from the Jets three-game winning streak, a stretch of games that had come to define the season and the status of the rebuild, seemed gone.
It wasn’t that they Jets lost last week that stung. It was that they lost to a clearly inferior team and got manhandled in the process.
Now though, something was learned about the Jets in their response this past Sunday at MetLife Stadium. In beating the Dolphins, they exorcised the demons from the Bengals loss. In coming back, they showed a willingness to hang tough and a measure of resilience that was lacking earlier this season.
The Jets showed that despite the opportunity to throw in the proverbial towel on the game and the season, that they simply weren’t going to go down without a fight. Twice in the fourth quarter, they fought back to take the lead after the Dolphins had gone up.
Twice, they came back, the final time good enough to win the game. Twice they showed no quit when it seemed that they were down and out.
Perhaps, in a year that has been bewildering and frustrating, this spine that the Jets showed late against the Dolphins is something to build on after all.
