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The rest of us looked at the performance—a week ago against the Chiefs—when the Jets were supposed to be a metaphorical movie set for the world champions, Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce and, of course, Taylor Swift, as a moral victory.
The rest of us thought it sure looked like something the team could build on. Maybe Zach Wilson wasn’t broken. Maybe a fast, aggressive defense was as good as we thought it was before Aaron Rodgers got hurt, an injury that, come to think of it, probably shouldn’t affect it much. Maybe Breece Hall would be where he was before tearing his ACL as a rookie, and Garrett Wilson would have his breakthrough season, even without Rodgers, after all.
Of course, that’s just the rest of us.
The people who matter in this equation weren’t really thinking that way at all.
“I don’t know. There’s a whole lot of season left,” Jets coach Robert Saleh told me Sunday night, as the team pulled through metro Denver. “I think everyone’s more upset that we didn’t get the opportunity to go win that game at the end of it—that we played our hearts out and that the end was the end. But I think this team knows that it’s capable of so much more. And I think this game is an example of it.”
Indeed, the Jets didn’t see the 31–21 win over the Broncos they were riding off with as the sort of revelation that the rest of us might have—somehow validating that the team going toe to toe with the Super Bowl champs a week ago was real. It was, to Saleh and others on that bus to the airport, more confirmation of what they knew coming out of a disappointing crash landing to the 2022 season, and what Rodgers knew when he chose to pursue a career reset with the star-crossed franchise.
After all the group’s been through already, there remained a lot of talent aboard that bus.
And the way all those talented guys feel about it, no one should be stunned with what we’re all seeing now, or what we saw specifically in Denver on Sunday, where the biggest plays were made by guys such as Wilson and Wilson and Hall and Jermaine Johnson and Quincy Williams proving that the well of talent in Florham Park runs far deeper than one player, as important as that one player might’ve been. Which is why Saleh kept setting the bar high.
“I think everyone is happy that we won, but we know that we lost a lot of points on the board,” he says. “I know that everybody knows we can play even better. And that’s encouraging. Just talking to our guys, it was for us. It felt like it was business as usual.”
The Jets, it turns out, after a really rough September that started with Rodgers’s injury and ended with lifeless losses to the Cowboys and Patriots, still are a pretty good team.
They knew that. Now the rest of us do, too.
