FOXBOROUGH — As he stood at the podium on Sunday after his team’s fifth straight loss Jeff Ulbrich said his team was facing “a moment of darkness.”
A moment?
The Jets interim head coach is massively underestimating how long the darkness has lasted. The Jets’ train is speeding toward the franchise’s 10th straight losing season with no signs of slowing down. Sunday’s 25-22 loss to the Patriots dropped them to 2-6. Asking a team that’s never been out of the hole, to climb the mountain isn’t realistic.
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It’s been a rough couple of years for Patriots fans, who have had a rough hangover since Tom Brady departed and most of the winning followed him out. But as bad as it’s been in Greater Foxborough, it’s nowhere near as bad as it is for Jets fans.
The Jets pushed all their chips in on this season. Even at 2-4, they traded for Davante Adams because the near future is even darker no matter what happens this year. They are only built for the short term and the present is quickly coming unglued. Instead of the Super Bowl they hoped for, they’re headed for a top five draft pick.
On the surface, it looked like the Jets hit a massive bad luck pothole last year when Aaron Rodgers suffered a season-ending injury just moments (actual moments, not Ulbrich moments) after the season started. And maybe they did.
Another year of Zach Wilson certainly wasn’t part of any successful recipe. But it might have been overestimating Rodgers. The future Hall of Famer was already declining in his last year in Green Bay and often seems more interested in promoting his conspiracy theories than staying an elite quarterback.
The Patriots players noticed on Sunday.
“Hall of Fame quarterback, hate to see him go out that way, but I’m always going to take a win against him,” Patriots defensive tackle Davon Godchaux said in his Louisiana drawl. “He definitely don’t look the same. … He don’t look mobile at all.”
Still, Jets fans have to root for the not-terribly-good-anymore and not-terribly likable Rodgers because they don’t have much of an alternative. There’s no quarterback of the future waiting in the wings.
This was supposed to be their get-right week. Against a Patriots team who got smoked by a bad Jacksonville team last week, the Jets hoped to stop the slide and gather momentum.
They already fired their coach. They already made a big trade. There aren’t many big moves left available. They better hope the Yankees extend the World Series for a while because when baseball is done, the city’s two awful football teams are going to move into the city’s bright media spotlight.
“We understand that the outside world is going to get really loud right now,” Ulbrich said. “But the only thing I know in life is that when it gets dark and it gets hard, that you work and you point the finger at yourself and you look inward and you figure out what can I do better from an individual standpoint.”
The Patriots have plenty of their own issues as Jerod Mayo and Eliot Wolf try to prove they’re worth the huge responsibility Robert Kraft entrusted them with.
But at least they start with Drake Maye, don’t have decades of ineptitude poisoning the well, and at least they’re rebuilding on purpose. It’s not a fun process.
But it’s better than being the Jets.
Follow MassLive sports columnist Matt Vautour on Twitter at @MattVautour424.
