C.J. Mosley, a decade into his NFL career, had been around long enough to know what this past week was going to be like for the New York Jets he captains. The team came in at 5–9. The game was on Christmas Eve. MetLife Stadium was going to be half full. And with the Washington Commanders playing out the string on the other side, the chances of checked-out football ran high.
So last week the five-time All-Pro linebacker turned to scripture, finding a Bible verse to take to his teammates to illustrate what was in front of them.
There was no turning the clock back to Week 1 for a group of players who entered the season with Gotham-sized expectations. But what they could do, Mosley told them, was carry the mentality they had that September night—with the idea that those dreams could come back alive.
“That’s the big challenge,” Jets coach Robert Saleh said, as he drove home from MetLife late Sunday afternoon. “[Mosley] read a verse from the Bible and talked about vision over sight. Sometimes in the moment, you can lose touch of the vision. If you’re living in the moment of what’s happening to you now, you lose that overall vision of what can happen later.”
Maybe it sparked something in a Jets team that raced to a 27–7 lead over the Commanders on a dreary day in New Jersey, then had to come from behind with Trevor Siemian for a 30–28 win. Maybe it didn’t. After all, they did almost blow that lead to a last-place team that switched quarterbacks midgame.
Either way, you can count Jets owner Woody Johnson in on Mosley’s message.
What the linebacker told his teammates to do Sunday was essentially what the person who cuts their checks did earlier in the day. Johnson’s actions, in affirming to the that Saleh and GM Joe Douglas would be back for 2024, did buy into the vision of what the Jets can be, which goes back to what they were on opening night, over the sight of what they have been since Aaron Rodgers went down four snaps into that first game.
With the team at 5–9 before kickoff—and after depth issues at quarterback and along the offensive line had sunk any hope of Rodgers making a miracle comeback right around, well, now—the decision to run it back writ large couldn’t have been a slam dunk. That Johnson would do it with three games left, though, says something about how strongly everyone felt about where the team was three and a half months ago.
“You can quote this one right here,” Saleh says. “Yes, the season’s been very hard. But at the same time, on Sept. 11, at 7:45 in the evening, when the announcements are happening and Aaron’s running out of there holding the flag, and the stadium was what it was, that stuff was all real. There was a lot of excitement. There was a lot of expectations. There was a lot of hope. It won’t be hard to get back to that.
“The challenge is going to be acting on that, keeping the quarterback upright, staying healthy throughout the year and doing what we all felt we could have done this year. I think that’s where Woody’s had great perspective.”
Sunday did bring some glimmers of what could’ve been.
New York’s defense ended the Commanders’ first two possessions with an interception and a sack. Washington wasn’t able to pick up a first down until the fourth time it got the ball. The Jets’ special teams blocked a punt. Breece Hall was physical, exploding for a 36-yard touchdown run. Garrett Wilson looked like himself. Even Siemian was efficient, with the kind of hands-at-10-and-2 quarterbacking the Jets could’ve used earlier in the season.
Then Sam Howell got benched, Jacoby Brissett came in and the Commanders scored touchdowns on three straight possessions to flip a 20-point deficit into a one-point lead.
And that’s the other side of it—and how much of this season has gone for the Jets.
