Sunday’s 31-6 loss at the Arizona Cardinals sent the Jets back to the drawing board. After last Thursday’s 21-13 win over the AFC South-leading Houston Texans, New York’s 25-point result was the team’s largest 2024 margin of defeat.
“It’s a lot of emotions, for sure,” said Aaron Rodgers, who completed 22 of 35 passes for 151 yards and fumbled. “I thought — after a big win Thursday night, nice long week — we were going to come out with a lot of energy and win the game, and we just didn’t come out with great energy on either side of the ball. And offensively, you’re not going to beat anybody scoring six points.”
With the Week 10 loss at the Cardinals (6-4), the Jets (3-7) have lost six of their past seven games. They never recovered from an opening-drive touchdown — Arizona went 70 yards in six plays and 2:02 — that set the tone.
“I don’t think we went into this with the wrong mentality,” said Garrett Wilson, who caught five passes for 41 yards. “I don’t think we went about our meetings, our practices this week in the wrong way. I just think that, at the end of the day, it’s all about Sundays. I said it all the time. When we go out and play bad, you’ve to maybe fake it a little bit to make it seem real. But the energy’s not there, because we’re playing like trash. So that’s how I see it.”
After next Sunday’s 1 p.m. game against the 4-6 Indianapolis Colts, who have lost four in a row, the Jets get a Week 12 bye. Starting Dec. 1, only six games remain.
“We’re going to keep fighting,” said Jeff Ulbrich. “In all honesty, the playoffs should be the last thing on our mind right now. We’ve just got to play better football. We’ve got to get back to basics, get back to doing the things we do well, featuring the players the best way that we can and then the players got to do the best job executing the game plan.
“And we’ll take this one game at a time and we’ll see what happens, but the beauty of this locker room is that we have some very prideful men in there, which I think is a testament to how they finished that game, especially in that fourth quarter … there’s not one quit from anybody — offense, defense or special teams. Character of that locker room is right. We’ve just got some things we’ve got to fix and clean up.”
At 5-5, the Denver Broncos are the third AFC Wild Card spot. The Colts and Cincinnati Bengals — 4-6 like Indianapolis — are ahead of the Jets.
“We’ve just got to focus on what’s in front of us and beat the Colts and get to the bye, sort some things out,” Rodgers said. “We’ve got a couple West Coast opponents coming up, 1 o’clock games. We’ll get … three division games. So a lot still in front of us.”
