The New York Jets lost to the Denver Broncos 13-11 in London on Sunday. Justin Fields completed 9 of 17 passes for 45 yards. He was sacked nine times. The Jets managed 82 total yards of offense.
The Jets are 0-6. They haven’t made the playoffs since 2010. Aaron Glenn is the first head coach in franchise history to start his tenure with five straight losses (now six). They’re the first team since at least 1940 to go without a takeaway through five games (they forced a fumble in their sixth!). And now they just flew to London to produce one of the ugliest offensive performances in recent memory.
At some point, the sports media needs to ask itself whether the Jets deserve the same level of coverage as teams that are actually trying to win football games. Because right now, it’s not clear they do.
The endless “What went wrong?” segments, the weekly autopsies dissecting the same organizational dysfunction we’ve been watching for 15 years, none of it serves any purpose beyond filling airtime. The Jets aren’t a football organization anymore. They’re a content farm that happens to wear helmets and play on Sundays.
Let’s talk about what happened in London, because it perfectly encapsulates why this needs to end.
Justin Fields went 9-for-17 for 45 yards and took nine sacks. The Jets had 82 yards of total offense. Eighty-two. The Broncos only had 248 yards themselves, which tells you everything about how unwatchable this game was. Bo Nix didn’t complete a pass in the entire third quarter. At one point, the Jets took the lead on a safety after a holding penalty in the end zone.
And the most telling moment? The Jets had the ball near midfield down 10-6 with a minute left in the first half. They ran three plays, then let 35 seconds run off the clock without attempting a fourth play. Aaron Glenn, in his sixth game coaching a winless team, just decided not to try.
That’s not football. That’s giving up. And if the coach has checked out on scoring points before halftime in a one-score game, why are we still checking in?
Aaron Rodgers is gone. He played two seasons with the Jets — tore his Achilles four snaps into Year 1, went 5-12 in Year 2, and got sent packing for Year 3.
The dysfunction he left behind remains. The organizational chaos that led them to hire Nathaniel Hackett because “that’s what Aaron wants” hasn’t been fixed. The pattern of making decisions based on anything other than competence continues.
The Jets traded for Rodgers, thinking he’d change everything. Instead, they got two years of content for WFAN while going 6-12 in games he actually played. They fired Robert Saleh five games into last season. They fired Joe Douglas mid-season. A former player told The Athletic that it was “the most dysfunctional place imaginable.”
Now Justin Fields is getting demolished in London while the team has already mentally moved on from trying to win before halftime. This is the post-Rodgers Jets. And it’s exactly what you’d expect.
The Jets aren’t uniquely bad in NFL history. Plenty of teams have been worse. The 2017 Browns went 0-16. The 2008 Lions did the same. But those teams stopped getting national coverage unless something genuinely newsworthy happened.
The difference? The Jets play in New York. The largest media market means every moment of dysfunction gets amplified and turned into programming.
Mike Greenberg built an entire ESPN brand around Jets fandom. He’s performed Jets misery on national television for years. That’s fine for him, it’s his job. But the machine requires constant feeding. ESPN runs segments on Jets quarterback controversies when the Jets are 0-6 and going nowhere. The New York media churns out 17 stories a day about the same organizational problems. National outlets send reporters to London to cover a game in which the starting quarterback completed nine passes.
The Jets keep being terrible because there’s no real consequence beyond getting fired, which just means the next person inherits the same broken system. And the media keeps treating every coaching change, every quarterback decision, every organizational shift as if they’re meaningful rather than just more of the same.
The Jets aren’t going away. Woody Johnson still owns the team. They’ll keep playing games and probably keep losing most of them.
But the sports media can make a choice. Cover the games. Report the news. But stop dedicating 30-minute segments to dissecting why a team that’s been terrible for 15 years is still terrible. Stop treating every Aaron Glenn press conference like it contains the secret to fixing this mess. Stop debating whether Justin Fields should start next week as if the quarterback position is the problem when the entire organization is broken.
Other bad teams don’t get this treatment. When the Jaguars were stuck in a permanent rebuild, national coverage dried up. When the Browns went 0-16, they became a punchline rather than a daily talking point. The Jets get special treatment because they play in New York, not because they’ve earned it.
The Jets are 0-6. They were bad last year. They’ve been bad for over a decade. At some point, the story isn’t “Can the Jets turn it around?” The story is “This organization has been broken for 15 years and shows no signs of fixing itself.”
That story doesn’t change week to week. Justin Fields getting sacked nine times in London doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know about the Jets or the Ohio State product. Aaron Glenn letting 35 seconds run off the clock before halftime isn’t some revealing new data point about his coaching philosophy; it’s just another Sunday for an organization that’s been making baffling decisions for 15 years straight.
The media treats Jets coverage like there’s always something new to uncover, some fresh angle that will finally explain why this team is a mess. But there isn’t. They’re bad because the organization is broken. They’ve been broken. They’ll stay broken until Woody Johnson sells the team or figures out how to hire competent people and then stay out of their way.
Because here’s the truth: if the media collectively spent less time covering Jets dysfunction, maybe — just maybe — the organization would have to actually fix itself instead of feeding the content machine. Or maybe they wouldn’t. But at least we wouldn’t have to watch.
The Jets lost to the Broncos 13-11 in London. Justin Fields went 9-for-17 for 45 yards and was sacked nine times. They’re 0-6 and haven’t made the playoffs since 2010.
That’s the story. It doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.