Bad decisions have kept the team that won the most meaningful Super Bowl ever out of the last 40 of them. But you never will convince a Jets fan that their karma didn’t go irretrievably bad when they moved into another team’s stadium in 1984.
“Every time I roll up in that bus and see that sign in blue, that bothers me,” said Brandon Moore, whose seven seasons make him the third-longest-serving Jet after Shaun Ellis and Bryan Thomas.
“They put up a big Jets sign and banners and whatever. But it always felt like it was somebody else’s stadium. I’m looking forward to the new one. It’ll be nice to not see the Giants sign on top of it.”
Nick Mangold said “home” got homier once the Jets moved their practice facility to Florham Park, N.J., last season, rescuing them from The George and Sunday night traffic back to their former practice facility at Hofstra. But asked if there was anything about Giants’ Stadium he would miss, Mangold said: “That’s a good question.”
Not as good as this one, though: What are the Jets, the NFL’s Joads, doing playing host to the final game, rather than the team that built the joint, named the joint, produced the vast majority of thrills in the joint?
This is not to imply that the Jets’ “Meadowlands Stadium” experience has been entirely 26 years of Blair Thomas. They once advanced to an AFC title game by smoking Tom Coughlin’s Jaguars, beat Peyton Manning 41-0 in another playoff game, and even came from 30-7 down on a Monday night to beat the hated Dolphins.
A self-pitying fandom would not like to acknowledge that five Jets playoff appearances in the last 11 years ties them with six other teams for 10th-most over that span. It hasn’t been all fake spikes, Richie Kotite, Browning Nagle and losses to Bill Belichick.
If the Jets beat the Bengals tomorrow night it will be the fourth time they will have clinched a playoff berth at the Meadowlands in front of joyous Game 16 crowds (1985 against Cleveland, 2002 against Green Bay, and 2006 against Buffalo). And lest anyone forget, they won every home game but one in 1998 on the way to 12-4.
Hey, Curtis Martin and Joe Klecko played off 16W, too.
Nevertheless, the Jets’ 102-104-1 home record since moving from Shea Stadium is a worse percentage than every other team in the NFL over the last 26 seasons except the Browns, Texans, Lions and Cardinals. There have been eight ghastly late-season collapses from playoff position, ranging from losses in the final three games to the final five to seven-of-eight.
So there will not be many tears shed tomorrow night, except those lingering from PSL bills. Any sense of sadness likely will be overwhelmed by a sense of weirdness. It is a Bizarro world that entitles the renters to close out a stadium after the landlords, who put together three Super Bowl seasons in it and stunk it out last week in their farewell.
Apparently the NFL never got a request from the Giants for the Week 17 home date, so the league didn’t prioritize it. Curious, almost as much as the 8-7 Jets controlling their own fate tonight after three final-possession losses, a rookie quarterback throwing 20 interceptions, and what should have been a killing abysmal Week 15 loss to Atlanta.
At least one member of every Jets team that played at the Meadowlands is expected to show up tomorrow night, but not the already-playoff-bound Bengals. Not untypical of a 26-year Jets, uh, visitation that was a lot more strange than it was inspiring.