Dearest sweet innocent Fireman Edward,
How you doing, buddy? This is a rhetorical question asked in halfhearted politeness, as I initiate this correspondence reasonably aware that you have spent these recent months weeping soulfully into the bucket of your upturned fireman’s hat while your inbox fills with messages from bovine Pats fans urging you not to feel ashamed at displaying your pathetic emotion in some sick public exhibition for their own fetishist delight. Do not allow them to see your snot-bubbly despair and become sexually aroused. Ignore their perverted agitations; treat yourself lightly. You’re merely reacting in the nature of your trade — by draining the giant fire hydrant inside of your face.
The roller coaster of emotions that most Jets fans have embarked upon this offseason began in the morose basement of their weathered psyches, and you are of course no different. Your team’s improbable loss in Buffalo halted a run toward the playoffs that, once there, could have conceivably carried them deep into a vulnerable AFC bracket. From the depths of your sorrow, Fireman Ed, may your spirit be enlivened by one mollifying truth: even in missing a postseason opportunity placed at Week 17 within easy grasp, the Jets had a Great Season.
Fitzpatrick had a tremendous outlier campaign. Marshall broke receiving records. Decker caught something like every third down pass thrown in his vicinity. Pryor tackled people really hard and Ivory, though now departed, ran his way to the upper crust of mediocrity. A new head coach won ten games when seven or eight would have been satisfactorily received.
Remember it all fondly. Once you’ve fortified yourself in a cocoon of alacritous nostalgia, may you find the strength to look toward 2016 with honest discernment, and let your heart then fill with dread.
When it comes – and it’s already aboard the urine-stinking express from Secaucus – regression will take your joyous retrospective sentiment and destroy it with dynamite. The most reliable indicator of a backwards step in year-to-year win total is a high number of close wins whose outcome could realistically have been less favorable – games won that could’ve easily been lost. The 2015 Jets didn’t raise a red flag in this category – six of their ten wins were by a double-digit margin – but the schedule they so dominated was roughly as challenging as finding an unsettlingly shaped tan line in Pensacola. Only two of their ten wins were against playoff teams (the Patriots and a Redskins team that benefited from the dumpster fire in the NFC East), and among their six losses were four against teams who themselves fell short of a postseason birth.
What I’m saying to you Ed is save the game tape from those thrilling victories against the Browns and Jaguars — pull them out while you’re amidst next year’s gauntlet. The Jets will face seven of this year’s playoff teams in 2016 – more than triple the postseason-caliber strength of this year’s schedule. This season had a difficult ending, but don’t ever forget that it also had hope – and next year when the Jets are in Arizona, you may not want to watch the game live. Maybe instead pull up the DVR of this year’s Titans game and reminisce.
As the Jets’ front office plays the most depressing game of free agent chicken of this offseason with Ryan Fitzpatrick – and as Fitzpatrick employs the Stephen Drew Free Agency Strategy of Incomprehensible Self Worth, while your brethren in the fandom wring their hands – know this well: Ryan Fitzpatrick will never be as good as he was in 2015, and in 2015 against a pitiful slate of opponents Ryan Fitzpatrick did not take his team to the playoffs. He self destructed in the season’s pivotal game, as you knew, in the cockles of your heart, that he would. The Jets have roughly $20 million available under the cap to fool with this offseason – if you think giving $14 million of it to Ryan Fitzpatrick better equips you to win a Super Bowl against that comparatively stellar 2016 schedule and those beyond, I think you’re dead wrong.
And that’s where I lose you, Ed, I know, because you can’t win in this league without a quarterback and Ryan Fitzpatrick is the best one out there, and you know him, and you like him, and he just almost did it for you. But here’s the reality you face, one that no one in New York City ever can: Your team will not contend for the playoffs. With or without Ryan Fitzpatrick, it doesn’t matter. You’re not winning next year. Bring him back if it’s reasonable, but don’t be duped in your hangover into letting him outsell his worth and disallow you from enhancing your roster elsewhere.
Don’t spend 70% of your spending cash on a quarterback who’s had one winning season in ten, whose career record is 43-61. Understand that big contracts to the likes of Brock Osweiller and Brian Hoyer do not necessarily mean that the market for middling quarterbacks is by rule becoming more expensive – so far it still means that teams who overpay for middling talent lose. When Ryan Fitzpatrick professes his worth, remember your aging secondary and offensive line, that your best receiver is also coming off an outlier season unlikely to be duplicated, and that at some point in the next 18 months you’ll need resources to fill those holes and you’ll still have to find and pay an actual franchise quarterback.
As you judge your team’s offseason, keep hold in your gloom to sober rationality: 2015 was great, and no matter what, 2016 will hurt.
Parquet 