The Philadelphia Eagles may have been laughing at the Jets last Sunday, but they weren’t alone. There has been a laugh track played along with Jets highlights for about a decade now. To Jets fans, it’s sad. To everyone else, they are a long-running joke.
And C.J. Mosley and Robert Saleh are exactly right – there’s only one way for them to stop being a punchline.
“If we’re not doing the right things, then we open the gates for the disrespect that happens,” Mosley said. “We open the gates for the blowouts that happen. We open the gates to get laughed at and get humiliated on the field and off the field. So in order to change that, we’ve got to change our mindset. We’ve got to do the right things on and off the field and win games.”
“C.J. is 100 percent right,” Saleh said. “Respect in this league is earned, it’s not given.”
And the Jets have a golden opportunity to earn a little respect at home on Sunday against the struggling, wounded Saints.
These are not the Saints anyone is used to seeing. They’ve lost five straight games and are a mess offensively, especially in the passing game which is now down to their third quarterback, Taysom Hill.
They’ll be without their top receiver, Deonte Harris, who’ll begin serving a three-game suspension this week. But he only had 31 catches on the season anyway – one behind running back Alvin Kamara, who returns this week after missing four games with an injured knee.
Kamara alone is good enough to make the Jets’ woeful defense look silly. But he is really the lone threat in their one-dimensional offense. That’s the perfect challenge for a Jets defense that is the worst in the NFL, worst against the run, and has been abysmal in its tackling for weeks now. Are they going to be the defense that was singed for 185 rushing yards in a 33-18 loss to the Eagles last Sunday, and has surrendered an absurd 159 yards per game on the ground over the past five weeks?
Or is the young defense going to step up and physically demand the respect it believes it deserves?
“As an organization, we got to find a way to go take it,” Saleh said. “Nobody is going to give it to us. No one is going to give us calls, no one is going to feel sorry for us. This organization has been through a rough time over the last 10 years and it’s not something that’s easy to fix. It’s not easy to change a narrative, it’s not easy to change perception.
“We’re going to get this thing flipped and we’re going to change the narrative and we’re going to earn the respect that we deserve. While it might be frustrating now, I know there’s something good happening and it’s going to happen.”
Just probably not on Sunday. The Jets defense has been embarrassed and humiliated several times this season, and emerged from soul-searching meetings determined to make sure it would never happen again. Yet each time they’ve ended up with nothing to show for their good intentions except another humiliating performance. They are getting better in some areas and there is hope for the future, but at the moment they are decidedly undermanned.
Which is why Kamara and Hill, who is more of a threat on the ground than through the air, might be enough for the Saints to do what the Eagles did last Sunday, when they scored on their first seven drives and didn’t punt until there was 1:48 left in the game. The Eagles are a better running team than the Saints, so maybe it won’t look so easy.
But Kamara is just the kind of back who can dominate a defense that has trouble tackling in the open field.
And if he can, there might not be much that Zach Wilson can do to keep up, even though he looked much improved last Sunday. He is now running an offense likely without his top two receivers (Corey Davis, Elijah Moore) and his top two running backs (Michael Carter, Tevin Coleman). He needs the defense to really help him out, to pick up the slack.
Unfortunately, that’s something they don’t seem able to do.
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