For 0-5 Jets, trip to London could be exactly what they need
Jets quarterback Justin Fields. Credit: Getty Images/Sarah Stier
Reiterating the many recurring problems that have dogged these Jets, chief among them turnovers and penalties, Aaron Glenn vowed that he and the team will continue to harp on the details that go into correcting them for as long as it takes to do so.
“There’s no magic wand that changes those things,” Glenn said on Monday after becoming the first Jets coach to start 0-5.
But if there was . . . wouldn’t it make perfect sense that it could be found in the land of Harry Potter?
That’s not why the Jets are in London this week, having departed New Jersey on Monday night. They are going to play a Week 6 American football game against the Broncos at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on Sunday. Perhaps while there, however, it might be beneficial to at least try a visit to Olivander’s or the Ministry of Magic. There obviously are great forces at play in the Jets’ current fate, and arming themselves against such elements is critical.
Then again, maybe the trip itself is exactly what the Jets need to snap out of their 0-5 drudgery. A change in continents could provide a change in content.
Just last year, a couple of crisscrossing trans-Atlantic flights altered the course of the franchise. The Jets were 2-2 at roughly this point in 2024 (imagine what they’d give for that right about now) when they departed for a game in Merry Ol’. When they returned, they not only had lost the contest to the Vikings through some very poor play, but coach Robert Saleh was fired.
They left their mojo in England last October. Perhaps they can go and retrieve it this time. Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers is hit hard while throwing a pass against the Minnesota Vikings on October 6, 2024 at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London. Credit: Icon Sportswire via Getty Images/Icon Sportswire
That’s undoubtedly optimistic at a time when it is difficult to muster such rosiness. The Jets haven’t provided much indication that they are capable of winning games, never mind one against a Denver team that is among the tops in the league and just knocked off the defending Super Bowl champs.
The Jets are the last winless team in the league. Even around here — where the Mets’ collapse is still echoing, the Yankees’ season is on a triple-brink of disappointment and the one-win Giants just lost a game in which they had five straight turnovers — the ineptitude of the Jets can be heard above it all.
The Jets weren’t planning on being this bad when they decided they would spend most of the week overseas rather than travel there on Thursday, as many teams do . . . and as they did last year.
“I went as a player in New Orleans and as a coach in New Orleans,” Glenn said. “We always went early and I always felt that the guys got acclimated a lot quicker when you go early. That’s something I just believe in.”
Forget about the physiology of it, though. The fortuitous foresight to go on Monday could turn out to be one of the regime’s more critical calls. It will take the Jets out of this place where they are constantly bombarded by negativity and bring them to rolling hills, lush estates and a land that generally pays no attention to the team’s woes.
“We’re going to be pretty secluded by ourselves for the next week, which I am looking forward to,” center Josh Myers said on Monday. “I love this team and I love the guys we’ve got. It’ll be a good trip. We’re planning on coming out in London a different football team.”
Defensive tackle Harrison Phillips said the adventure could serve as a mini training camp.
“You don’t go to some Division III college and stay in a crappy college dorm because it is best for an NFL player, you do it to build a team,” he said of the few remaining franchises that still take their summer workouts on the road. “So in a very condensed version, we are going to go and be on buses together, be on planes together, we are going to be away at a hotel in London together as a team. This is a moment where we have to lock arms and lean into one another. It could set us up for success.”
It can’t make them any worse.
“When we are 0-5 and the rhetoric and the narrative and the media is a thing we do, what we have to do is try to block everything out and say, ‘Hey, let’s just turn on the tape,’ ” Phillips said. “Sometimes it’s appropriate to show bad clips, clips where we didn’t play our best, but it’s also good to show highlight clips and remind players, remind the entire unit, when we played at our best, this is what it looked like. This is what it can be because we’ve done it before.”
That sounds like a pretty short film. If they showed it on the flight, it could have been over before the Jets even taxied to the end of the Newark runway.
But maybe the movie on the flight home will have its own newer highlights. Maybe it will last a little longer, too. Maybe the Jets will be too busy celebrating their first victory of the season — their first victory of the Aaron Glenn Era — to even watch it.
“It’ll be a good trip for us,” Glenn said of this week’s journey. “Again, we’re going there for one reason, and that’s to go win the game.”
OK. But in a strange, mystical, perhaps even wizardly way, it could be the act of going there itself that helps them accomplish it.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
