For a second straight year, a Jets season with lofty expectations failed to come to fruition as Sunday’s loss in Miami eliminated New York from playoff contention to extend the postseason drought to 14 years.
“Extremely shocked and disappointed and frustrated and every other adjective you could think of,” interim head coach Jeff Ulbrich said about the Jets’ elimination from contention.
“They work the right way, the process is intact, and that’s what makes this so much more frustrating and just maddening because the process is right,” Ulbrich said earlier. “The guys are working hard during the week, walk-throughs, meetings, the whole thing. Details high, energy high, executions high and it’s not translating to the field on Sundays well enough. It’s very frustrating.”
And for a second-straight season, it is reasonable to wonder “what if?” as the Jets fell to 3-10.
A year ago, the season went wrong four plays into the first offensive series when Aaron Rodgers’ Achilles snapped. This year, a healthy but older Rodgers soldiered past a few nicks and bruises to make every start so far, but the quarterback and the offense have not performed up to his high standards.
“The expectations were high and we didn’t reach ‘em, not anywhere close,” Rodgers said after the 32-26 defeat to the Dolphins. “Felt good three weeks in… everybody felt real good, and since then it’s been a lot of difficult games with opportunities to win.”
After a 2-1 start to the campaign, the all too familiar Meadowlands lament of “what if?” arrived in the form of nine defeats from 10, with seven of those losses coming in one-score games. And in five of those losses, New York had a lead in the fourth quarter. That was the case Sunday.
“Losing period sucks,” wide receiver Garrett Wilson said. “When you’re up in the fourth quarter all the sudden it starts to feel like you have a losing problem. It’s like you have a gene or some s—. It’s not like we’re just going out there and getting our butt beat from start to finish. We have a chance to go win a game, we’re supposed to win a game, odds are in our favor and we’re finding a way to lose the game. So it’s just frustrating for sure.”
When Rodgers hit Allen Lazard for an 18-yard gain to put the ball at the Miami 27-yard line with under two minutes to play, ESPN had the Jets’ win probability at 77.3 percent. That number hit 81.9 percent in New York’s favor after going up three on a 30-yard field goal with under 50 seconds to play.
“We gotta find a way to finish and close these things out and be at our best when our best is required,” Ulbrich said. “We’re not getting that accomplished and I gotta look at myself first.”
Ulbrich then paused for a beat before adding, “That last drive, it’s interesting. I’m gonna stay up some nights thinking about that last drive.”
On the final drive of the game, the Dolphins needed just eight plays to cover 70 yards and score the game-winning touchdown with quarterback Tua Tagovailoa used a short passing game to beat any pressure the Jets had planned.
“The instinct is to be ultra-aggressive, but I think it was three or four screens on it, so he was definitely playing us for pressure and trying to get after him,” Ulbrich said. “So gotta provide a better answer for our players.”
The result was Rodgers never touched the ball in the extra period.
“We just didn’t figure out how to win enough games,” the now 41-year-old QB said. “I didn’t play good enough in some crunch times, that’s why we’re sitting here with the record that we got.”
Despite the season ending on a sour note, Ulbrich praised the locker room for continuing to fight and staying together.
“There’s some teams that might relent a little bit, that might relax a little bit, might start thinking about the offseason, start thinking about their own thing,” he said. “I haven’t felt that from that locker room at all…. It’s a great testament to them.”
He added: “We gotta find a way to finish this thing off right.”