We're Only 5 Weeks Into the Season and the NY Jets Are Being Urged to Start Tanking

This is another of those precious moments I've enjoyed over the course of two decades at this company where I find myself saying, "If the New York Jets didn't exist, I'd have to invent them." Consider where this downtrodden, dispirited, 3-D, 360-degree, high resolution IMAX shitshow of a franchise was a week ago:

And where they find themselves. Even in an NFL where fully 25% of the teams have one win or less, the Jets stand alone at the bottom of the Valley of the Shadow of Death:

And if you wish to argue that they could easily be one of those 1-4 or even 2-3 teams, you've got another thing coming:

Jets X Factor -  To best encapsulate the Jets’ ineptitude over the past four games, we should look at their win probability flow charts.

These charts provide a more accurate visualization of a team’s general competitiveness throughout a game than the final score or stats. This is because they depict the feel of the game at every moment from start to finish.

And when you chain the Jets’ last four win probability charts together, you see the reality:

[Per ESPN]

…[T]he Jets have never had a win probability above 25% at any point over the last four second halves.

Over the last four fourth quarters, the Jets’ win probability has never gone above 10%.

Which leads to the inescapable conclusion that they're not climbing out of this hole any time soon. That the point will come when they have a better shot at the No. 1 overall pick than winning a single game. 

And when you look at a few brain-breaking stats, that time may have just arrived:

Source -  A new stat following the New York Jets‘ latest defeat offers up more evidence for why the team must tank for the No. 1 pick in the NFL Draft and move on from Justin Fields. … 

While quarterback Justin Fields had good numbers on Sunday (309 total yards and two touchdowns), he did not play well in his role as the leader of the offense. They managed just 22 points against one of the worst defenses in the league, and he was sacked five times as he posted an awful 24.2 quarterback rating. …

In games where the opposing team scores 21 or more points, the 11th overall pick in the 2021 draft has a horrifying record of 0-26.

It sends one clear message. In an era where the game is geared toward offense first, Fields just can’t hang and will only win games if he is on a team with a top 10 defense. That is why the New York Jets must start planning for the end of the Fields era and tank for the No. 1 pick in April.

Which might sound like a drastic strategy given that it's so early into the month of October that only about half of all CVS's are playing Mariah Carey Christmas music on constant repeat. But this site is not alone in seeing the desperate writing on the wall. Many people are saying …

So yeah, when nothing is going right offensively, defensively, with the coaching or the quarterback, and there is no hope in sight, the only logical thing to do steer into the skid and embrace being the only winless team in football. To root for things to get even worse so you can find the next thing to hope for. 

Which in the Jets case, will be the next franchise QB they can ruin. Bad luck with that.