“Who want to fly with them f—— Jets?”

In years past, the answer to Aaron Glenn’s signature post-game victory catchphrase would have typically been a resounding “Nobody”.

Could the turntables be turning?

Perhaps, although one win over a Robert Saleh and Cam Ward-led Tennessee Titans team isn’t nearly enough to make that claim just yet.

Nonetheless, it’s impossible not to notice how aesthetically different Sunday’s Jets team looked from the Jets teams that formed the lowly reputation that the franchise holds today.

The Jets pulled an anti-Jets

Usually, there is not a soul who wants to “fly with them Jets.” Not free agents, not head coach candidates, not even their own fans at times.

Why would they? The Jets are among the NFL’s most worn-out punching bags. They have been the butt of many a joke for as long as most football fans have been alive.

That’s what will happen when you carry streaks of 58 years since your last Super Bowl-winning season, 16 years since your last playoff season, and 11 years since your last winning season.

The Jets, though, have always seemed to catch more flak than even the other NFL franchises with comparable streaks of despair, whether it’s the division rival Miami Dolphins, the Jacksonville Jaguars, the Arizona Cardinals, or the Detroit Lions, among others.

Perhaps that is part of the territory when you play in the New York City media market. Naturally, the Jets will always draw attention, win or lose, while a team that plays in Jacksonville can stink in silence.

Certainly, though, part of the Jets’ laughingstock reputation is their own doing. The Jets typically don’t just “lose football games”—they lose football games in a “Jetsy” way, and the fact that you know exactly what I mean is the entire point.

I’m not going to trigger Jets fans by rattling off the infamous lowlights, but I’m sure you are already picturing some of them. This franchise has a knack for losing in ways that are uniquely designed to elicit belly laughter from any nonpartisan observer, whether those antics occur on or off the field.

Not only is that a troubling trend from an organizational perception standpoint, but it’s also the antithesis of football’s winning formula on the field: not beating yourself.

You hear it from losing teams all the time:

  • “We beat ourselves.”
  • “We shot ourselves in the foot.”
  • “We lost it more than they won it.”

More often than not, the team that wins the football game is the team that does less of the things that those aforementioned cookie-cutter quotes allude to. Football isn’t about out-playing your opponent—it’s about out-not-screwing-up them.

The Jets are usually awful at that, hence their ridiculously long reel of comical blunders. It’s not merely as if the Jets have struggled to win games and they just so happen to do it in a way that looks uniquely laughable—the sheer laughability of their errors is precisely why they are so consistently bad.

If you ask the history books, the team that has beaten the New York Jets the most times in NFL history is the New England Patriots, with 77 total regular season and playoff wins.

The Jets’ real nemesis, though, is… the Jets.

But on one sweltering afternoon in Tennessee, it wasn’t the Jets who were singing the blues.

Sunday’s win over the Titans was one of the cleanest performances that Jets fans have seen in years. Head coach Aaron Glenn, who caught plenty of much-deserved heat for the messiness he oversaw in his debut season, deserves credit for the well-oiled operation that he engineered in Week 1.

Just look at these numbers from the victory and bask in them, Jets fans:

  • 0 sacks allowed
  • 0 turnovers
  • 3 offensive plays for negative yards
  • 5 missed tackles on defense

To find the last game where the Jets reached all of those marks, you have to go back to Week 17 of 2013, the finale of Geno Smith’s rookie year, when he led the team to a 20-7 win over the Miami Dolphins.

The Jets can clean up their eight penalties, but otherwise, they did a fantastic job of not getting in their own way.

The drive-killing sack never happened. The game-tilting turnover never happened.

The offense only went backward three times, less than half of their 30th-ranked average of 7.1 times per game in 2025. Defensively, the Jets took care of business, whiffing on just five tackles (per PFF) after averaging 8.9 per game last year.

They often say that teams take on the persona of their quarterback, and that was the case in this game. New York’s team-wide stability was an embodiment of the cool, calm, and collected demeanor of Geno Smith, who had one of the cleanest games in franchise history.

Behind a dominant offensive line, Smith looked like a prototypical pocket passer, orchestrating the Jets’ offense with efficiency and consistency. Smith completed 19 of 24 passes (79.2%) for 215 yards with no interceptions or sacks taken.

It was just the eighth time that a Jets quarterback threw for 200-plus yards and completed at least 75% of his passes while throwing no interceptions and taking no sacks, and just the third time it was accomplished on the road.

In a way, Sunday was an out of body experience for Jets fans.

This is a group of people who have been trained to expect that the other shoe is always bound to drop. Good things have happened to them on Sundays before, but rarely without something else happening to cancel it out just minutes later.

But in Tennessee… that shoe never dropped.

You kept waiting for it. The Geno Smith interception. The sack-fumble. The special teams turnover. The pass interference to set up a touchdown. “What’s the catch?”, thought fans after the Jets went up 20-3 in the third quarter.

Yet, the clock kept ticking… and the scoreboard never stopped showing a Jets team in control.

Eventually, it set in: They’re… really not going to blow this one, are they?

Well, when you’re a Jets fan, you can never truly believe that until the clock says 0:00. When the Titans scored to make it 23-10 with 2:42 left, and Isaiah Davis bobbled the onside kick, you could feel a seismic impact across the tri-state area from the millions of hearts that simultaneously dropped.

But Garrett Wilson recovered it. Life went on. And the Jets are 1-0.

The Jets did not record a blowout of historic proportions on Sunday. Their offense did not light up the scoreboard the way that many teams around the NFL did in Week 1. Surely, their victory will not be among the top 10 headlines around the league today, perhaps not even the top 20. The point is not to elevate the Jets to “potential juggernaut” status.

What the Jets did do is something that Jets teams of the past have rarely done, even in their highest moments: run a professional, steady football operation.

Efficient. Consistent. Disciplined. Fundamentally sound.

Those words have never come to mind when describing “New York Jets football”, but at least for one Sunday, they did, and that means a whole lot when projecting the team’s floor moving forward.

Eventually, the Jets will need a quarterback who can rack up explosive plays and a defense that can rack up takeaways if they want to push their ceiling to championship-caliber. They might not have the personnel to do those things this season. That personnel will come in the near future (especially if the Colts, Cowboys, and Packers keep losing).

In the meantime, the franchise’s goal is to raise their baseline foundation high enough to the point where a championship-caliber ceiling is reachable. That’s what has held the Jets back for so long; they have not been able to get the floor high enough to even think about building a ceiling. You can’t reach the roof from the basement. They have continuously skipped the middle step, trying to tank their way from worst to first overnight.

That isn’t the way to go, not for a franchise that has spent a decade-and-a-half injecting a losing mentality into their DNA. The Jets need to learn how to win games before they can learn how to win championships.

And to learn how to win games, you first have to learn how to not beat yourself. On Sunday, they did that, and they did it to a level of success that has rarely been seen from recent Jets teams.

Whether that continues remains to be seen. For now, enjoy it, Jets fans—at last, the other team is the butt of the joke.