Year 2 Of Latest Edition Of Jets’ Neverending Rebuild Set for Takeoff Against Favored Ravens
Talk is worthless. Fans are tired of the Jets’ pleas for patience in this neverending rebuild, always two years away from being two years away. This team has experienced one winning season in an 11-year playoff drought, and 2022, the second season of the Robert Saleh/Zach Wilson, Head Coach/quarterback partnership, portends to be no better.
Memo to the Jets: If you want to change the narrative surrounding this laughingstock of a franchise, start winning some games. And there’s no better place to start than at the home confines of MetLife Stadium on Sunday, when Gang Green opens the season against the Ravens.
There are obvious reasons why Baltimore is a 6.5-point favorite in this matchup. They have a unique weapon in quarterback Lamar Jackson, the 2019 NFL MVP, who has the ability to run circles around New York’s defense. This team will be well-coached and ready to play with physicality, especially in the run game.
But let’s not kid ourselves—the Ravens have the potential to be a solid playoff contender this season, but they’re not supposed to be worldbeaters. They were 8-9 last season (7-5 with Jackson in the lineup) and did not address their glaring need for an impact wide receiver in the offseason.
As for the Jets, they’d like you to believe that they’re a young team to lay the foundation for a season of making excuses for all their mistakes. However, 37-year olds Joe Flacco and Duane Brown aren’t the only roster members who have pushed the team’s average age up to 26.1, the 9th oldest in the league as of the 53-man cutdown day of August 30. There’s a decent mix of veterans to complement the first-and-second year players on both sides of the ball.
With Wilson sidelined until at least Week 4, according to Saleh, in order to get his right knee bone bruise fully healed, it will be Flacco’s ball on Sunday (the right call, by the way, despite all the noise about Saleh’s misrepresentation to the press on Monday that Wilson was a possibility for Week 1). Though his record as a starter is a brutal 2-11 since leaving the Ravens, where he served for 11 years and won a Super Bowl, after the 2018 season, Flacco will be better prepared to avoid the kind of game-changing gaffes that plagued Wilson all through his rookie campaign.
The talent gap among the Jets supporting cast has also shrunk, thanks to offseason acquisitions to bolster the offensive line, tight end, and defensive backfield. Potentially dynamic edge rusher Carl Lawson will return to the field on Sunday after missing all of last season with a ruptured Achilles. With the exception of Wilson, New York came out of the preseason relatively healthy, though now there is concern that Brown hasn’t practiced this week due to an injured shoulder, which bears watching considering the team’s lack of depth behind him.
So why do prognosticators give New York almost no chance to win on Sunday? You’d expect a team that will expend the fourth-highest cash payout in the league this season ($257 million, per ESPN) to set high goals for themselves. This is the NFL, where you don’t need a five-year rebuilding plan. When taking over a lousy team, Year 1 is for weeding out the deadwood, Year 2 is when you should see the team take strides in solidifying the core, and by Year 3, it should be time to rock-and-roll, competing for playoff berths. Kyle Shanahan’s 49ers and Zac Taylor’s Bengals both reached recent Super Bowls in their third seasons at the helm after taking over train wrecks. Great ones, like Bill Parcells’ Jets and Sean McVay’s Rams, turned their dysfunctional programs around in two years.
Ah, but these are the Jets. The Saleh/Wilson era may be in Year 2, yet no one at the Florham Park facility seems to operate with any urgency to get things moving. They still publicly espouse the same “meaningful games in December” mission, instead of “playoffs or bust.” That way, knowing they haven’t won a game in September in four years, they think few fans will feel deprived when they fall short of the low bar.
As such, a Jets fan would have to be drinking a very special brand of Kool Aid to have high expectations for this team, starting with Sunday’s game. The 6.5-point spread should be taken as an insult to these Jets, yet a Ravens cover seems a more likely outcome.
Prediction: Ravens 26 Jets 16