Disappointment, So Warmly Familiar

In the dark, final week of the 1981 season, while the Jets were playing themselves (and the Giants) into the playoffs, the Colts and the Patriots played what we called (h-huh) the Toilet Bowl. The Patriots were 2-13 going into the game, the Colts were 1-14 and were from Baltimore.

Payback is a bitch. Only in this case it's worse when the original bitch in question doesn't even remember that Toilet Bowl. Maybe the Jets are the bitch, and now our Jets are getting the bitch slapped out of them. As for the Colts and the Patriots, next week's game is a Toilet Bowl - if, by "toilet" you mean Belinda's extraordinary vanity set surrounded by sylphs and angels in "Rape of the Lock." Each team is undefeated. This is actually the Super Bowl.

The Jets lost to the Bills 13-3 in a game that ranks among the most boring games I have ever seen. I saw two unimaginative offenses unable or unwilling to throw THE !@#$%*& BALL DOWNFIELD. Chad Pennington looked incapable of throwing for more than 12 yards, and I like the guy. Add to that the Jets' strange inability to give the ball to Thomas Jones when everybody knows that this is what teams have to do when the passing game is gone... Well, I could just go on and on. I'm so sad.

The final touch was yet another late game interception, this time thrown by Kellen Clemens. Unlike in previous weeks, the game was hopeless by then. The Jets would have still been down by 3 even if they had miraculously discovered the end zone, and lately everything has come hard. In light of the Jets' remarkable run last year, even the doubtful Sports Illustrated had predicted they would come close for the Wild Card this season. Now this season's distinction is that it ranks among their most disappointing. In the shadows of the Gang Green's checkered past, that's saying something.

How far back does our disappointment go? How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky? It takes some archival work to itemize it. I'm definitely your guy. To fit the definition of a disappointing year, you must first experience the rush of expectation at the start of a season that makes you say, "This is the year," which for Jets fans mostly means you say, "Maybe we'll make the playoffs this year." There are plenty of years past where such thoughts never entered my mind - the two years of Ritchie Kotite are good examples. Although even I was surprised that the Jets won only one game in 1996. I mean, who expects that without forgoing the team altogether?

To be fair, begin with 1970. To happy fans of our brief championship years, the post-merger turned out to be an enormous letdown. If you exempt the Baltimore Colts as division rivals, the Jets actually went 4-25 against pre-merger NFL teams in the first eight seasons of the 1970's. Now that was disappointing, especially since it was the Jets who vanquished the NFL dragon in Super Bowl III. It's pathetic, actually. But welcome to the Gang Green. It set a marvelous precedent for expectation:

1970: Baltimore's revenge for SB III. Namath injured for the season against the Colts at home. 4-10

1971: Paul Naumoff smacks into Namath in preaseason, rendering Joe lame for most of the season. 6-8

1972: Familiar strains for our year. Then as now, we coexist in our division with an unbeatable team. 7-7

1973: Another revenge for SB III. Namath injured for the season in an away game against the Colts. 4-10

1974: First, the Jets play themselves out of the playoffs, losing to losing teams, but then they win the last six games of the season and raise hopes for 1975. 7-7

1975: And that was a mistake. First, Jets win all their preseason games. And preseason ain't worth a warm bucket of athletic tape. 3-11


Ah, yes - the 1980's. This is the decade where I learned what it would take to be real New York Jets fan. And yet I'm still here. So what does that say?

1980: Everyone everywhere puts the Jets in the conference championship, if not in the Super Bowl. They win four games but grant the Saints their only win, at Shea no less. 4-12

1983: The record shows that there were several close games throughout the year, but the final record was 7-9, nonetheless. Before the opener against San Diego, Richard Todd appeared on the front cover on SI. Need we say more?

1986: The Jets levitate, then look down. By definition this is a disappointing year because they won 10 of 11, then lost five in a row. Commence the nightmares. From here, recovery is very long.


Of course, in order to experience disappointment, you must have had high hopes to begin with. Through most of the 90's, that was never a problem:

1992: It's ridiculous to consider it now, isn't it? But...Browning Nagle: the Man. I mean, he played well in the Hall of Fame Game. Ah well. 4-12

1999: After Carroll, the Faked Spike, Kotite the Savior, and a couple of flirtations with greatness, Vinny Testaverde snaps his Achilles on the newly replaced turf at Giants Stadium at the start of their Super Bowl year. So, no Super Bowl. The Jets recover from a mostly losing first half of the season, then win 6 of 8. Parcells calls the second half of the year his greatest acheivement as a coach, but then quits, arrogantly assuming that Belichick will be there to take his place. The joke has been on us ever since. 8-8


And in this decade? Ebb, flow, flow, ebb, flow, ebb, flow, ebb. All kinds of fertile ground for crushed hope:

2000: Maybe when all the stars aligned against us (Parcells and Belichick gone, Keyshawn gone, Al Groh there) we thought that it meant somehow that we would win regularly. Why would we think this? Even after winning the Monday Night Miracle, we still lost the last three games of the season. 9-7

2003: Familiar injuries to Chad, free agent departures to the Redskins, inconsistency, unhappiness. 6-10

2005: A year most familiar to our own. A kick away from the AFC Championship the year before, and then....familiar injuries to Chad. Brooks Bollinger to the rescue! Herm gave up, and good riddance. 4-12

So prepare for the rebuilding years to come, my friends. The silver linings are of the domestic kind. My wife has just reminded me that as unhappy as I am now when the Jets display a TOTAL INCAPACITY TO THROW THE !@#$%*& BALL DOWNFIELD, I'm still a bigger bastard when I worry about the Jets in the playoffs.

Thrown Away

If I don't add an entry, then the swarm of information from the intraweb overwhelms what there is of A Fan's Life. Seventy-nine entries, but "what have you done for us lately?" The same could be asked of the Jets, who labor at 1-6.

I have never known a Jets season to be so perfectly consistent in one weird statistic: game-closing interceptions. In weeks 2, 4, 6, and 7, Pennington (and Clemens week 2) has thrown the game away. He gets honorary mention for week 5 when the game against the Giants still seemed within reach late in the fourth quarter, though the Giants eventually won with more than just an interception of his pass for a touchdown. The Bengals just about finished us off with one late in the game last week. It adds a new stress to the question of whether Pennington should be benched, although one cannot ignore that his numbers are largely good throughout each game. But hey - who's really paying attention, anyway? The Giants are playing well, albeit against poor teams like the Jets, but even a Giants head cold gets more attention than a Jets clean bill of health, so why should anyone care about the Jets' woes?

I do, still. Of course. How is that ever going to change? I'm going over stats of the games and wondering the way a good Jets fan does; he considers what might have been. We've been lucky to walk away from games in the past, shaking our heads mostly with contentment and wonder. Now, not so much. All we can do is reflect on how close we've been. Great teams find a way to win, and though the Jets might not even be a good team this year, you'd hardly be a good Jets fan if you didn't consider what might have been if Pennington had made it on those final drives. Seriously, look at the game breakdowns. They might right now be 4-3, still wondering what kind of season they were having.

But here, in the reality-based fandom, we recognize what kind of season this is. We've had experience with disappointing performances for decades now. We know how the Jets are doing. The offense is cumbersome, uninspired, and apparently easy to read late in the game. Jonathan Vilma is out. This all sounds familiar. We like it better in the fantasy. Just end the season.

The Lame Game

All this week I have been forced to endure a barrage of insults from the young Philadelphians with whom I work. The truth is we are, all of us, fans of a team with one win under their belt. The Eagles are playing in the shadow of three other superior teams in their Eastern Division. I had thought that the Jets were better team than the Bills, but I was wrong; they are just barely better than a pushover Dolphins club. If you want to see why both the Jets and the Eagles will be staying home in January, you need only watch the Patriots-Cowboys game at 4:15 pm this afternoon.

The Eagles fans with whom I work in Delaware County know how much I love the Jets, but that doesn't matter when it comes to heckling. But then their heckling doesn't really matter either. They do it with a kind of an overly self-conscious skepticism about their own team that undermines the effect of their pepper:

"Jets suck worse than the Eagles, man."

"Yo. Jets are going down, asshole."

"God, I hate this hoagie. Sort of like the way I hate the Jets."

"Jets won't fly like the Eagles will. Asshole."

And so on. Always with a sound to their voice that conveys a feeling of unease, sort of the kind that says, "But, you know, if the Eagles don't win, I won't be surprised." I've never been good at heckling, myself. Philadelphia fans are famous for booing Santa Claus, but they are the really best known for being able to tell you after-the-fact why they were sure their team was going to lose all along. And frankly, writing this as I am near halftime of the game, I can imagine how my pals at work were chattering to one another in front of their TV's about Brian Westbrook's dominance (especially after his called-back touchdown run) but are probably also now saying that they've always known all along how overrated a kicker David Akers is, particularly after he's badly shanked a second kick in the first half.

As for the Yets, I've seen some terrible missed tackles and the usual unimaginative offense that's fooling no one. The entire season is going to be like this. Ben Graham's decent punt late in the second half produced nothing more than opportunity for Graham to show off some of his Australian Rules tackling abilities when none of his colleagues on the down field coverage could get to little Reno Mahe. No harm done. Akers missed his kick. Ugh. And this is pro football?

It will be nice to hear what the geniuses at work have to say about the Jets' Titans uniforms. Unless the Eagles really do open up against us, my colleagues are not going to have anything to grind into me other than a Jets loss - unless they want to make noise about the mighty blue and mustard that Titans of New York are wearing today. They look like the Chuck Knox Los Angeles Rams of the 1970's. The New York Titans became extinct for a reason; they were mediocre. Their legacy lives on, though. The Jets' 2007 season certainly pays tribute to that so far.

Recurrent Ads: Berserk-Making

During the NFL season, a football fan is subject to one of the great tests to his loyalty - the numbingly recurrent advertisement for either automobiles and beer during breaks from the game. These drive me berserk.

First, the jingle. Well, actually there is no such thing as a jingle any longer - just a signature song that is pulled from the catalog of an artist whose best work is way behind him. Back in the 80's, Chevrolet took whatever tolerance listeners had for Bob Seger and reduced it down to a few bars of his song "Like a Rock" - a mullet-wearing yabo's fantasy anthem if ever I heard one. It remained in place for a good ten years. John Mellencamp traded in his credibility by offering up his song "Our Country" to the gods at General Motors. The advertisements commemorate a past where Chevrolet trucks were always there at the important moments in American history - the end of World War II, the moon landing, the election of Ronald Reagan. Good times. I like the way car companies always portray the past as if all races of people in America celebrated these things together all along, and they all bought Chevy trucks. How many times do I have to hear it? It is maddening.

Honda, on the other hand, is suggesting that you "Hold on Tight to Your Dreams" by way of ELO. Volkswagen used ELO's "Mr. Blue Sky" to good effect. MasterCard uses three schoolboys dancing like neurological patients to Funkadelic's "We Want the Funk." But auto ads are the last bastion of the non-ironic advertisement, and I suspect it is no small measure related to how ad people see football fans as the only remaining people who actually buy any kind of schlock, especially the feel-good nonsense kind about dreams coming true through purchasing an expensive car whose fuel consumption keeps us nicely imprisoned by the insane politics of the Middle East. Football fans just ain't that interested in what all that shit means, man. So, you know...fuck that.

Let's not forget Budweiser's ever-present ads for "Budweiser Select," which is as likely undrinkable as Budwesier itself. Using The Chemical Brothers' song "Galvanize," I suppose the advertiser is trying to nab the clubber who goes out after the game to galvanize the action. Blech. Enough. It's torture. I hear those reconfigured strings, and I want to take my own life.

Add to all of this the fact that the Jets lost to the Jints, giving away the early lead and turning he ball over on a potential game-winning drive, and I may never watch football ever again.