The Jets enter Week 18 7-9, and eliminated from playoff contention, a huge disappointment after the team was 6-3 going into their bye and needed, realistically, even a .500 finish to have a playoff shot (which turned out to be true, as 10-7 would be a playoff record in the AFC).
Because of the way the season ended – 1-6 since the bye with five straight losses – it’s easy to focus on the negative, but for head coach Robert Saleh, he simply has to look at the flip side of the coin: the Jets are set up well for the future.
“We have a tremendous young core, I do believe that," Saleh said Sunday. "I look at the first half of our season and we're fully healthy going into the bye week, 6-3 and everything was looking up. But then one thing leads to another, then you lose a couple really tight games, and these last two games it just hasn't been anywhere near playoff-caliber football for us.”
All of that is going to happen to even the best teams at times, and one thing Saleh has hammered home all year about his young squad is that they need to learn how to finish games. Not doing that, especially over the first three weeks of their losing streak, is something the head coach lamented in the moment after his team’s elimination.
“You lose to a Minnesota team in the last second, a Buffalo team in the last second, then the Lions in the last second…I know we're close,” Saleh said. “And I know it stings right now, but I know we've made a lot of headway with the last two years and we'll continue to do so."
Five of the Jets’ last seven losses have been by one possession or less, so it really does come down to that idea of closing – but even in the four games they lost by double-digits, at least one player doesn’t believe they were ever whipped like the Jets of old would’ve been.
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“Every week, no matter who was where, we truly believed we had the opportunity to go out and win the game, but obviously it didn’t work out the way we wanted it to,” center Connor McGovern said Monday. “There wasn't a single game this year that you were like, 'wow, we got smoked. We were an awful team and they were better than us.' Some of the losses…we felt like we were in every single game, and had an opportunity at some point to do the right things to try to separate, and we never really capitalized on this final stretch like we did at the beginning of the year.”
That’s questionable just in the last two weeks – they’ve been outscored 42-9 by two fringe playoff teams – and they were beaten handily by two playoff teams in Cincinnati and Baltimore. But regardless of how anyone else looks at it, once again, Saleh is going to focus on what could’ve been, and how far the team has come since he took over.
“We got a taste of it, we were sitting at 7-4, and we battled down to the wire with three teams in playoff position, and I think the sour taste is that we just weren’t our best over the last two weeks,” Saleh said. “That’s where for me it’s really disappointing, not doing our best against two teams in that position. Al of it’s tough, but I’ll look at all the good things, the foundation we’ve laid and how far we’ve come since Joe (Douglas) and I locked arms two years ago. The direction we’re going in, there’s a lot of things to be excited about. Unfortunately, this year, it just didn’t happen.”
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