We didn’t even make it to Christmas week. Maybe we knew this already. Maybe it was clear when the Giants started 2-8, when the Jets skidded to a five-game losing streak.
Maybe all it took was a trip to Sunday Ticket every week, or the Red Zone Channel, where all around the league you could see teams far more worthy than our teams.
Maybe.
The end is still jarring. The end still stings. The end comes with three games left in the regular season, with so much good football and so many interesting football games to be played in San Francisco, in Philly, in Miami and Cincinnati and Dallas, in just about every football precinct beyond New York.
It ended for the Giants in New Orleans, midnight finally arriving for Tommy DeVito, running for his life all over the Superdome, absorbing seven sacks and barely avoiding a handful more. It ended for the Jets in Miami, where somehow across 30 minutes of a professional football game at Hard Rock Stadium the Jets gained five (5) yards.
It ended 24-6 for the Saints.
It ended 30-0 for the Dolphins.
Nine losses in blue, nine losses in green, and the only question left is this one:
How many days til pitchers and catchers?
“I’d say nothing we did was good enough,” Giants coach Brian Daboll said, “Nothing was where it needed to be. They did a better job than we did all the way around.”
Said Jets coach Robert Saleh: “Credit to them. They won the battle up front and whenever you lose up front it doesn’t feel good.”
One way to summarize it all?
“Disappointing,” Saleh said, shaking his head.
A week after enjoying a dual burst of life and energy, a week after playing the best games of their respective careers, the two young quarterbacks spent much of the afternoon hearing bells clang in their heads.
DeVito still made a few terrific throws, but he also spent some time in the blue medical tent after his head slammed against the turf late in the first half. The Saints also took great delight several times in adopting DeVito’s signature gesture, piling on for sport.
Zach Wilson was in an even darker place. On the Jets’ first drive he was swallowed whole by the Dolphins’ pass rush and fumbled the ball away on the Jets’ 1-yard line. He was sacked four times, and on a lot of snaps there were more Dolphins in the Jets’ backfield than Jets. He gave way to Trevor Siemien for good just before the half.
And so it ends. So it goes. Four months ago the Giants were hoping to parlay last year’s feel-good 9-7-1 (with a playoff win) joyride into a culture-defining parlay. The Jets, emboldened by the addition of Aaron Rodgers, dared to talk about the Super Bowl. Instead, they won’t even make it to the final fortnight with their seasons intact.
Instead, for the 10th time in the last 12 seasons there will be no football at all in New York at the best time of the football calendar. Coal in everyone’s stocking, whether your stocking of choice is dyed green or blue.
Bah, humbug.
Bye, football.
“They came out fast and had momentum from the start,” Jets linebacker Bryce Huff said of the Dolphins, “and we could never match it.”
“We needed to be better than that, and they took advantage,” Giants linebacker Bobby Okereke said of the Saints.
DeVito? He may have been banged up and bruised but at the least he still sounded like the confident kid who’d captured the city’s football imagination these past few weeks.
“Nothing too crazy out there, we just lacked execution and didn’t play with enough swagger,” DeVito said. “I put that on me.”
It was a nice gesture. But really it was on all of them — every player, every coach, every week and almost every game, both sides of it, green and blue, East Rutherford and Florham Park. As we turn the lights on on the holiday season, we click the lights out on the football season. Way too early. Pitchers and catchers on deck.
