The Jets May Have Lost Trevor Lawrence, But They Reminded Us Something About the NFL

We know plenty of Jets fans are sick over Sunday's outcome. But for the rest of us, their first win of the season should be celebrated.

What else can we call it but beautiful?

Jets-Rams will be a significant footnote in NFL history, assuming both the Jets and Jaguars lose their remaining games and wunderkind Trevor Lawrence finds himself playing football in northern Florida instead of New York (the Jaguars currently hold the tiebreaker for the No. 1 pick). This game provided the kind of macabre humor that has clouded the Jets’ franchise for decades, distilled to its purest form and pumped into the stadium by the gallon. Here was a team that could not complete the simplest of tasks throughout the season, a team that blitzed eight defenders on a Hail Mary and lost, a team that was on a collision course with the worst point differential in modern NFL history, sprinting down the field and dunking on one of the best defenses in football for one afternoon of meaningless perfection.

Here was a team beginning its fifth decade completely adrift at the quarterback position losing out on the surest thing we’ve seen in a prospect since John Elway, and there wasn’t a person on either sideline who had a good explanation of how or why it happened.

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Maybe Jets fans will disagree with our word choice—beautiful—at the top of the page, but Sunday was a 60-minute advertisement against the idea that any franchise can legitimately tank a season in this sport. This is not to say the Jets were trying. Certainly the season began as an earnest attempt at competing before the wheels fell off. The team had stars before cutting or trading them away once its playoff chances evaporated. But there are too many independent actors. Too many egos. Too many players who have gotten sick of being pushed around each week who finally, collectively find that euphoric, I-don’t-give-a-damn buzz on a random Sunday against a likely division champion. Too many coaches who know their days are numbered and show up on the sidelines one day feeling like the jewel thief Alfred describes to Batman in The Dark Knight.

“Some men,” he says, “just want to watch the world burn.”

And watch it burn the Jets and head coach Adam Gase have, though from a strange and oddly satisfying distance. The outside world will be critical of the loss when those of us who love the sport should be standing and applauding what we saw on the field Sunday. This was purity. This was love of competition (or hatred of current circumstances, coaches, whatever). This was as stunning and innocent a victory as we’ve seen over the last decade. We can become cynical during the age of organized self-sabotage, with front offices systematically dismantling their teams and selling off parts in efforts to rebuild, always looking a few short years ahead. We forget that the coach, for example, has no interest in taking part in this because he’ll be released of his duties anyway. We forget that most of these players benefit in no way from Lawrence coming to the Jets and are simply trying to string enough solid tape together to make it another season in the league.

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It was reminiscent of the Dolphins, who stripped themselves to the bare minimum in 2019, got clobbered by 49 points in their season opener, lost six more games after that and then … finished the season with a win over Tom Brady and the Patriots to end a respectable 5–11. Four other teams picked before them in the 2020 draft.

Maybe the Jets won’t end up that good. There are only two games left, after all. But for a day they were good enough to upend the idea that you can collectively will a group of more than 60 players, coaches, trainers and administrators to do anything that doesn’t ultimately involve their best interests. And their best interests are to play well. That is good for the game. That is good for the sappy idea that when you drag your kids to their first game amid a lost season (or continue dragging them in front of the television), that they can still see something unexpected. Something beautiful.