House Jets

The Wound

January 1969. That is the last time this house won anything that mattered.

Not the last decade — the last fifty-seven years. A man named Namath promised a victory in public and delivered it, and every single thing that has happened to the New York Jets since has been measured against one afternoon that most of the realm is too young to have seen. They hold the longest active drought in the sport.

The tragedy of this house is not that it fails. It is that it fails inventively, in ways nobody predicts, every year, forever.

The Six Hundred Dollars

Here is how this house loses a lord.

They drafted Geno Smith in 2013 and handed him the seat. He held it two years. Then, in August of 2015, a teammate approached him in the locker room about a plane ticket — six hundred dollars, for a football camp in Texas that Smith had missed because someone close to him had died in a motorcycle accident days before.

The teammate wanted the six hundred dollars back. Smith did not pay it.

The teammate broke his jaw. Two fractures. He was released within hours and claimed by Buffalo the following day; Smith missed the opening of the season, watched Ryan Fitzpatrick get hot in his absence, and played exactly one game that year. He never got the seat back. He was gone from the house inside two more seasons.

A lord of this house lost his throne over six hundred dollars and a punch he did not see coming. There is no other house in the realm where that sentence is even possible.

He is back. Traded home this spring, thirty-six years old, having spent the intervening decade elsewhere becoming precisely the thing New York decided he wasn’t — a starter, a Pro Bowler, a man who won games. The house that gave up on him has run out of other ideas and sent for him.

Whether that is a restoration or the setup for the next inventive disaster is, genuinely, anyone’s guess. It is the Jets. It has never once been the first thing.

The Lord

Geno Smith, thirty-six, back in the building that broke his jaw and gave away his job.

The Knights

• Breece Hall — forty-five million to stay, the one thing this house has refused to get wrong.
• Minkah Fitzpatrick — on the Watch, acquired from Miami and extended immediately. A serious man for a house not often taken seriously.

Ancient Grudges

• House Patriots. The defining humiliation of the modern era. A steward left this house for that one, or the other way around, depending which version you are told — and then New England spent twenty years winning, loudly, next door. The Jets have never let it go. New England barely noticed.
• House Bills. Divisional, cold, and additionally the house that claimed the man who broke their quarterback’s jaw. Nobody has forgotten.

What Changed This Spring

They brought Geno Smith home, paid Breece Hall, added Minkah Fitzpatrick and Joseph Ossai, and sent Justin Fields to Kansas City. That is a house making real moves. Nobody believes it, and the realm ranks them twenty-eighth of thirty-two.

Prophecy

That fifty-seven becomes fifty-seven and not fifty-eight.