It’s a quote famously uttered by Bill Parcells, who not-so-coincidentally happens to be the only multi-season head coach in New York Jets history with a winning record.
“You are what your record says you are.”
It’s a lesson that some New York Jets fans must heed at this point in time.
The Jets are 2-6. Yet, some fans still cannot escape the logic that the Jets – the same Jets who currently own the AFC’s 15th seed and the 2025 draft’s 4th overall pick – are somehow just a few hairs away from being one of the top teams in the AFC.
Their logic is fairly simple. Four of the Jets’ five losses in their current losing streak were by one score. In three of those four losses, Greg Zuerlein’s missed kicks were worth enough points to make up the difference between a win and a loss. In the other loss (vs. Minnesota), the Jets’ offense actually outscored the Vikings’ offense, but a rare Aaron Rodgers pick-six was the difference.
If Zuerlein just made his kicks and Rodgers doesn’t make that one mistake against the Vikings, the Jets would be 6-2 right now!
This. Logic. Does. Not. Work.
As a fan, it is easy to get caught up in the consequences of your own team’s self-inflicted errors while forgetting that the other team committed them, too. If you’re going to go back and flip a mistake the Jets made, you have to flip one the opponent made. And once you do that for each game, you realize the Jets probably should have lost, anyway.
Zuerlein missed a game-winning field goal in the Jets’ 10-9 loss to Denver. But he never would have had that opportunity if Denver’s Wil Lutz did not already miss a field goal on the previous possession. Had Lutz made that field goal, the Jets were all but cooked. Not to mention, it’s absurd to claim the Jets had any business winning a game where they could not score a touchdown at home despite their defense allowing negative passing yardage in the first half.
Rodgers’ pick-six may have ultimately been the difference against Minnesota, but the Jets still got outplayed throughout the game. They let the Vikings come out and bury them into an early 17-0 hole, lost the turnover battle, and played atrociously on offense, going three-and-out seven times and only scoring touchdowns on two possessions that were already set up for them in Vikings territory. The Jets got outplayed and deservingly lost.
Sure, Zuerlein missed two field goals in a 23-20 loss to Buffalo where the Jets actually played fairly well and deserved a chance at the victory. But you cannot talk about Zuerlein’s misses without also mentioning that Buffalo’s Tyler Bass missed a field goal and an extra point. In a hypothetical world where you could reverse all of those missed kicks and retroactively give both teams their points back, the Bills would still win, 27-26.
Then, the Jets got embarrassed on prime-time in Pittsburgh in a game that felt like a must-win. It was their second blowout loss of the season, giving them two blowout defeats to a measly one blowout win (coming at home against a miserable team that proceeded to beat them later). The Jets’ lack of blowout wins puts them at the mercy of too many nail-biters. They seemingly had the talent to win games decisively, but it is clear by now that they are nowhere close to capable of running away with victories on a routine basis.
This week, the Jets lost 25-22 in a game where Zuerlein missed a field goal and an extra point while New England did not miss any kicks. It is extremely easy to look at the final score, add the four points lost via Zuerlein’s kicking, and say the Jets would have won if they had an average kicker.
But if we’re going to sit here and say the Jets would have won if Zuerlein made his kicks, then we can also claim the Patriots would have had the game wrapped up early if their receivers did not drop countless potential big plays in which the Jets’ secondary left them wide open. Furthermore, Drake Maye was cooking the Jets before his injury, and when he left the game, the Patriots essentially sat on the ball for the rest of the first half. If Maye did not get hurt, it is easy to picture the Patriots running away with the game.
Above anything else, it is baffling to blame a kicker for the Jets losing to a 1-6 team that had lost four of its past five games by 16+ points. In no world should that game have come down to one, two, or even three field goals. The Patriots are an openly awful team that hardly gave their maximum effort to win the game. Even they don’t believe in their ability to win. At the end of the first half, the Patriots got the ball back with 1:51 on the clock and essentially decided to milk the remaining time instead of trying to score, drawing boos from the crowd. The Jets could not defeat that team.
The Jets are 2-6 and they deserve to be 2-6. The notion that you can go back and flip results because of missed kicks is faulty, ignoring that both teams can go back and reverse mistakes that cost them points.
People tend to point to missed kicks as game-reversing mistakes because it is easy to recognize their impact, as kicks directly translate to points, but those kicks make up such a minuscule portion of the impactful plays throughout the game. The offense and defense make countless mistakes throughout a game that indirectly cost the team many more points than the kicks. It’s just that the impact of those mistakes is subtler than that of a missed kick.
There is no question that Greg Zuerlein is partially responsible for the Jets’ 2-6 record, but he is a much smaller part of it than some fans would like to admit. In each game where his kicks contributed to costing the Jets a win, the Jets were arguably the second-best team on the field, anyway.
Parcells said it: You are what your record says you are.
We can spend all day analyzing the coin-flip moments on a team’s schedule that could have flipped victories. We can try to judge a team’s “true” quality based on their on-paper talent, film, and analytics. But Parcells’ famous quote will always ring true.
I, perhaps more than anyone, prefer to analyze teams by their performance in totality (via metrics like point differential and DVOA) rather than their win-loss record, but even I cannot deny the unbeatable weight of the almighty standings. At some point, winning is a skill. Even if you are consistently in close games, if you usually find a way to lose, then you probably just aren’t good at winning – simple as that.
Even if we do want to dive deeper and try to evaluate the quality of the Jets’ cumulative performance this season beyond their win-loss record, it is difficult to claim they “should” be any better than a 3-5 team at best. They have a -2.2 SRS (Simple Rating System), a Pro Football Reference metric that adjusts point differential for strength of schedule. That ranks 22nd. They also have a -14.6% DVOA, which ranks 25th.
Pro Football Reference’s system has the Jets with 3.4 Expected Wins, while the DVOA system has them at 2.6 Expected Wins. Average those totals together and you get precisely 3.0 Expected Wins between the two systems – a 3-5 record.
So, sure, it is fair to say that a 2-6 record might be underselling the Jets a little bit, and that 3-5 might be a more accurate representation of their performance this year. Therein lies a more accurate way to look back at a team’s missed opportunities to win close games.
You cannot go back and give a team every close game, but you can regress their close-game “luck” (although finishing close games is arguably a skill) to the mean in games that went down to the wire. The Jets are 1-4 in one-score games. We’ll remove the Patriots game from that sample since it was an utterly inexcusable performance that by no means deserved a victory, so we can say they went 1-3 in “respectable” one-score games. Flip one of the two losses to a win, and now you have an even 2-2 record in close games where the result could have gone either way. Now they’re 3-5.
So, congratulations. The Jets are not “really” a 2-6 team. They’re more like a 3-5 team. Whoop-dee-do.
It is pointless to use Zuerlein’s missed kicks or any other near-miss opportunities to try and flip the Jets’ losses into victories as a way of showing they are not actually a bad team. They are definitively bad, no matter how you slice it. Suggesting the Jets “should” be anything better than 3-5 is vastly overselling the way they’ve played this year.
