By Joe Brod<\/p>\n
This is it! This is our year! We\u2019re finally gonna do it! The Jets are going to win the Super Bowl!<\/p>\n
Not so fast. For some odd reason, I don\u2019t seem to share the enthusiasm of the majority of my fellow Jets fans going into this season. It\u2019s not that I don\u2019t think they are that good \u2013 they are. It\u2019s not that I don\u2019t believe in Rex Ryan \u2013 I happen to base my life on his teachings. It\u2019s not even that I don\u2019t believe in Mark Sanchez \u2013 hell, anyone who knows me thinks I am his personal PR man.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s because I am a Jets fan.<\/p>\n
I know, I know. Most who know me will now say, \u201cbut I thought you didn\u2019t buy into all of that \u2018same old Jets\u2019 stuff?\u2019\u201d Well, I don\u2019t. I do not believe in karma. I do not believe that this franchise is cursed. I do not believe that there is some strange, evil metaphysical force preventing the Jets from winning. Hell, I hardly even believe in bad luck.<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t even really about them, it\u2019s about me. Well\u2026 maybe it\u2019s kind of about them. Let me explain why I feel this way:<\/p>\n
I feel this way because one of my earliest memories of Jets football is the \u201cMud Bowl.\u201d This was the AFC Championship Game loss to Miami that got Walt Michaels fired as head coach. And if that wasn\u2019t enough, the Jets replaced him with Joe Walton, who at his introductory press conference announced his intentions to \u201crebuild.\u201d Rebuild what? You just came within a game of the Super Bowl. What the hell is there to rebuild? You\u2019re right there!<\/p>\n
I feel this way because of the \u201cfake spike.\u201d A terrible moment which to this day means I should probably never meet Dan Marino because if I do, I will kick him squarely in the nuts. This precipitated the firing of Pete Carroll, not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself but it was followed by the single darkest moment in Jets fan history. The moment that gives Jets fans the ultimate trump card in suffering. Whenever a fan of a another traditionally moribund franchise tells me that I don\u2019t understand how bad they have it, I look them dead in the eye and ask them \u201chas the owner of your team ever stood at a podium, announced that he was \u2018tired of losing\u2019 and that he \u2018wanted to win now\u2019\u201d and then proceed to hire Rich freakin\u2019 Kotite? The Jets lost 28 of their next 32 games \u2013 so much for being tired of losing.<\/p>\n
And finally I feel this way because of \u201cVinny\u2019s Achilles.\u201d 1999 was absolutely our year. We had just lost the AFC Championship Game after leading at halftime. John Elway was retired and out of the picture. We were primed and loaded and then came the first series of the regular season. We couldn\u2019t even get teased for seven or eight weeks. Our world came crashing down less than five minutes into the season. To give you an idea of what that felt like, my father is fond of telling people that he only hopes I have the same look on my face the day he dies that I did when Vinny went down in a heap on opening day. It was that bad.<\/p>\n
These are specifically the reasons I can\u2019t seem to get myself too excited about this being \u201cour year.\u201d I, personally, don\u2019t seem to see them running roughshod over the rest of the NFL on the way to what some seem to feel is their guaranteed eventual coronation.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not the same old Jets. It\u2019s the same old me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Joe Brod This is it! This is our year! We\u2019re finally gonna do it! The Jets are going to win the Super Bowl! Not so fast. For some odd reason, I don\u2019t seem to share the enthusiasm of the majority of my fellow Jets fans going into this season. It\u2019s not that I don\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-9071","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-featured-editorials"},"acf":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/peLffi-2mj","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/miletestsite.com\/jets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/miletestsite.com\/jets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/miletestsite.com\/jets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miletestsite.com\/jets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miletestsite.com\/jets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9071"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/miletestsite.com\/jets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9109,"href":"https:\/\/miletestsite.com\/jets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9071\/revisions\/9109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/miletestsite.com\/jets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miletestsite.com\/jets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miletestsite.com\/jets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}