The Giants had a 40-year head start on the Jets. The Giants have three Lombardi Trophies in their display case, or three times as many as the Jets do, and they won four other NFL Championships before The Big Game (or the Jets) were even invented. Just four years ago, the Giants made a Super Bowl run for the ages, and it sure felt as if there were 10 times as many Giants fans as Jets fans around here in early February of 2008.
So why does it suddenly feel like someone has taken a giant can of dye and painted the town kelly green? Why does it seem as if the Jets are the big brothers now, the hunted, the ones setting the agenda in a town whose football soul has been shaded blue since the Coolidge Administration?
Well, part of it is volume, much of it attached to the human amplifier that is Rex Ryan. We’ve never really looked at the Jets-Giants relationship in anything close to the context of our other intramural wars in New York. Islanders-Rangers was as hateful a rivalry as anything we’ve had since the Dodgers and Giants skipped out west, and for a time so was Rangers-Devils. The Mets and the Yankees played a World Series once.
But Jets-Giants? What does it tell you that the most anticipated — and most celebrated — meeting between these teams was clearly the one that took place on Woodstock Weekend in 1969, of all times, in the Yale Bowl, of all places, in an exhibition game, of all things. That 37-14 Jets victory came seven months and five days after the Jets’ lone Super Bowl win, expedited the firing of Giants’ coach Allie Sherman . . . and set the stage for absolutely nothing across the next 40 years.
Quick: name your most compelling Jets-Giants memory from 1969 to 2009.
What you get are snippets, like memories spliced from a forgettable highlight reel. You get Joe Namath limping into the end zone in super-slo-mo, hand raised, requesting not to be tackled (and the Giants complying). You get Lawrence Taylor barking about playing like “crazed dogs.” You get the last day of the 1988 season, the Jets knocking out the Giants on a last-second drive. And that’s about it.
Then Rex showed up one day, and he cleared his throat. The Jets made it to the 2009 AFC Championship Game, lost to the Colts, and two days later, unprompted, he said, “We are the biggest show in town, and that’s what it’s going to be,” which was the first time any employee of the Jets had ever dared to poke a stick in the Giants’ eye.
Rex pressed these thoughts between the pages of his book last spring:
“When people ask me what it¹s like to share New York with the Giants, my response is always I am not sharing it with them — they are sharing it with me.” And: “I have news for you: We are the better team. We’re the big brother. People might say they are the big, bad Giants, but we are not the same old Jets.” And: “It seems clear that right now we are the better team and we are going to remain the better team for the next 10 years.” And:
“We are going to take over the town whether the Giants like it or not, so those fans on the fence that like both teams are going to be Jets fans in the end.” It isn¹t just the overtaxed voicebox of one coach, though. The Jets have become aggressive players in every market while the Giants have taken a far more passive approach. The Jets have those back-to-back title game appearances in the same two years that the Giants suffered through back-to-back late-season meltdowns. The Jets seem Xbox cool, the Giants Atari quaint.
That doesn’t take an eraser to history. It doesn¹t transfer ownership of those Lombardi Trophies from the Timex Performance Center in East Rutherford to the Atlantic Health Training Center in Florham Park. And doesn¹t change the fact that the Giants are still the older brother, with the vaster fan base, still the deeper culture of success.
But it does make the present interesting, promises to make this season fascinating. And feels certain to allow the Christmas Eve meeting between these teams to become the surpassing, seminal moment in these teams’ shared history. Forty-plus years after Woodstock Weekend, it’s about time.