Well, you have to give the NFL this much:
It wants a neutral Super Bowl. It wants the two best teams in the sport to have to use foreign locker rooms and unfamiliar practice facilities. It wants the teams headquartered at five-star hotels, shuttled to and fro by bus and taxicab, not by players simply commuting to work.
And the NFL gets what it wants. Last year, when it looked like the Saints might have assembled a good enough team to break the streak of 46 straight neutral-site games, the sport was visited by Bountygate, New Orleans coaches and players were scattered to the wind by suspensions, and that was that. In the first eight Super Bowls, Miami was host city three times and the Dolphins were participants three times — and never did the twain meet.
No, the closest we’ve ever come was in Super Bowl XIX when the Niners played at Stanford Stadium (it takes the crow 32.1 miles to fly from San Francisco to Palo Alto) and Super Bowl XIV when the Rams played in Pasadena, which sits a mere 10.6 miles from downtown Los Angeles. As with everything else the league touches, this is the prevailing truth:
Stuff always works out for the NFL.
So, naturally, we should have seen this coming: the worst four-game start for the football locals in 10 years, with a very real possibility we might be careening toward the worst football season New York has seen since 1996. And not to get anyone too riled up or anything, but 1996 also happened to be the last time the Giants and the Jets switched coaches at the same time.
(Right. Like anyone needs to be pushed to turn the griddle up a few notches higher on either side of Gotham’s Great Football Divide…)
It’s early, yes. But the quarter pole is an awfully good indicator most years where a team is headed — and in our case, it’s almost always a fair predictor of whether there will be important games lurking once the air turns frosty or if everyone will be focusing on the Rangers, Knicks and Nets by Thanksgiving.
And the news isn’t good.
Back in 1996, the consensus nadir of New York football over the past 25 years, the Giants and Jets were a combined 1-7 after four weeks — and it could be argued the best of the season was already behind them. Thankfully, by then, the ’96 Yankees had all but consumed the town, so Dan Reeves’ final Giants team could stagger toward 6-10 in relative anonymity and Rich Kotite’s signature 1-15 Jets calamity could wander aimlessly through the desert using Frank Torre, John Wetteland and Jeffrey Maier as cover.
Big Blue and Gang Green have no such luck this year, because the Bombers and the Amazin’s just combined to give us the worst baseball season since 1992, when the Mets and Yankees both finished in fifth place in their divisions. Basketball camps are just opening. Hockey season has begun, though only the most fiercely devoted are aware of that.
Nope. The Giants are 0-4 and the Jets are 2-2 and they have bright, blinding spotlights attached to them, and since that wretched ’96 season there only has been one year when the teams were as bad as 2-6 after the first furlong. Not surprisingly, that was 2003, the last time both teams posted losing records, one of only three seasons since then when neither team made the postseason. That was Jim Fassel’s last year with the Giants; the Jets were sunk in the preseason when Chad Pennington was lost with a broken wrist.
The Giants were a long shot to host the Big Game anyway, the Jets an even longer shot. But now there seems to be little doubt that for the 48th year in a row, the Super Bowl will be Switzerland. But even that is secondary when you consider how much pro football has become a part of the city’s sporting fabric the past few years, the Giants winning two titles, the Jets making two conference title games and plenty of news. And the season is already looking like it’s working on a backup generator on the first day of October.
“We have to get back to work,” Tom Coughlin said after the Giants’ half of the Sunday Afternoon Follies. “What other choice do we have?”
Better back to work than back to ’96, when Frank Reich had the best QB rating in the city at 68.9 (Dave Brown was 61.3), when the Yankees’ bandwagon helped to obscure a lost autumn on the gridiron. No such luck this time around. No such camouflage. The Giants and Jets are on their own. You might want to shade your eyes.