Opinion: A lifelong Jets fan searches for a silver lining in the Aaron Rodgers disaster

Editor’s Note: Julian Zelizer, a CNN political analyst, is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author and editor of 25 books, including the New York Times best-seller, “Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Lies and Legends About Our Past” (Basic Books). Follow him on Twitter @julianzelizer. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

It’s not easy being green, as Kermit the Frog liked to say. In the world of professional sports, there are few things that compare with the heartache of being a life-long, season-ticket-holding New York Jets fan. Sitting in my regular seat last Monday night at MetLife Stadium, I saw all my hopes and dreams for this season disappear.

I was already worried when the Jets brought former starting quarterback Vinny Testaverde onto the field for the coin toss. I immediately leaned over to my friend Jon to say, “Testaverde? I hope this doesn’t jinx everything.”

On opening day in 1999, Testaverde, who had taken the Jets to the top of the AFC East the previous year, only to lose to the Denver Broncos in the championship game, ruptured his Achilles tendon early in the game. His season was over and so were the dreams of devoted Jets fans, including me and my father, who were seated in the stadium, watching as we had been doing since the late 1970s.

Little did I know. The moment quarterback Aaron Rodgers fell to the ground on the fourth play of the game felt biblical, and not in a good way. The air was let out of our collective dreams. Throughout the rest of the game, people were checking social media, calling their friends and reading their favorite sports sites just praying that it would be a light ankle injury.

During halftime, I stayed in my seat while my friend went to grab a drink. I could barely move. This one hurt. The new season of HBO’s documentary series “Hard Knocks” had raised my hopes, presenting the Jets as a team on the cusp of finally breaking through (CNN and HBO share a parent company, WarnerBros. Discovery).

I had told our son, who was studying overseas, that this time we had the real deal on our hands. He humored me over Facetime, but I could tell he didn’t believe it. He was right. Just a few plays into the opening game, it looked like the same old story. The same old Jets. Every year the fans get excited, and every year things go terribly wrong. What Jets fan can forget that when the team made it to the 1983 AFC Championship game, heavy rain and an unprotected field created a “Mud Bowl” that advantaged the Miami Dolphins, who won 14-0?

Fortunately, Monday’s game wasn’t a complete disaster. The rest of the evening turned out to be pretty thrilling as my team pulled off a terrific victory against the Buffalo Bills. The overtime finale left the packed crowd leaving the stadium, chanting “J-E-T-S” and celebrating into the parking lot.

The next morning, reality set in. As the news arrived that Rodgers was out for the season with a torn Achilles tendon, the fact that we were left with middling quarterback Zach Wilson felt like the worst hangover a person could have. The new season of “Hard Knocks,” suddenly seemed like a big, bad scripted reality-television joke.

There are two ways to explain Jets history: the curse or the structure. Those who believe in the curse conclude that fate, or supernatural forces must be at work. Things will always go badly. When quarterback Joe Namath took our team to the Super Bowl in 1969 and won, he must have made a deal with the devil that it would never happen again. No matter what they do, someone will get hurt or someone will play poorly. The Jets could literally draft the entire Super Bowl Champion Kansas City team and it would not have worked out the minute they stepped onto our cursed field.

The other way to think about the Jets is to consider the structural issues. There are recurring problems that keep giving the fans these broken teams. Co-owners Robert Wood Johnson and Christopher Johnson, some have argued, and the late Leon Hess before them, don’t know football. They make poor management decisions, they fail to patiently build a team around a functional culture, and they move from one coach to the next without a long-term vision.

The Jets have not had a good track record with the draft, either, suggesting that the people behind it aren’t taking the right approach. They allow promising quarterbacks such as Mark Sanchez or Sam Darnold to be thrown into the fire of the NFL — and New York media — before their time. Management rarely seems to pay sufficient attention to building an outstanding offensive line, the heart and soul of any team and the line of protection star quarterbacks depend on. The desperation that the team feels to win has created a culture of impatience and haste. Perhaps just as important, the Jets have a long history of hiring older players past their prime, who may be especially susceptible to injuries like the one Rodgers suffered.

As a Jets fan, none of this feels good, but there’s a silver lining here for me in my day job as a political historian. In analyzing American politics, we often oscillate between these two modes, similarly lamenting a tragic twist of fate or digging deeper to examine the systemic failures. Some prefer the first approach, perceiving issues like the rise of former President Donald Trump, or an immigration crisis as an accident, a product of the moment. Things just moved in a certain direction and the gods conspired to give us a particular problem or opportunity, that line of thinking goes.

Others look at the structural forces. With the case of Trump and Trumpism, for instance, we focus on the evolution of the Republican party, the effects of intense polarization and changes in the media landscape to understand how we reached this point. Chronic failures to address immigration policy are more pertinent to understanding challenges at the border or in our cities than some sudden, random occurrence. Thinking about root causes and structural issues also provides a clearer sense of how these issues can be addressed, even if change requires bold initiatives.

So, in terms of politics, the Jets offer a way to puzzle through our public life and think about the different ways to understand and cope with our current state of affairs. As Americans wrestle with the instability that has been evident with our democracy and question how toxic some politicians can get, maybe it’s time more elected officials and voters examine why our politics keeps ending up in the same place rather than hoping a new quarterback — or president — will miraculously be able to save the day.

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