Let’s start with what’s likely, what’s most probable, the way this seems destined to work out: it’s not going to work. It’s not going to happen.
The Jets’ defense will be a bear. The running backs will break off two or three mad dashes every week that’ll take your breath away. The Jets will win some games, especially once the schedule softens, and maybe even surprise one or two others the way they surprised the Bills Monday night.
But Zach Wilson almost certainly won’t get them where they were hoping to get all the way up till about 8:25 p.m. Monday. Wilson — or whomever Plan C happens to be, whenever the Jets settle on a Plan C — simply isn’t going to provide the elite brand of quarterback play a legit contender yearns for across 17 games and three to four more in the playoffs, nor occupy the kind of rarefied quarterback air Aaron Rodgers has breathed most of his football life.
OK. So start there.
But the truth is, there are examples scattered all across the Super Bowl Era of quarterbacks who rose from obscurity, were handed the keys to a Cadillac and found a way to keep that ride on the road. Those outcomes are rare. They aren’t all exact blueprints for what the Jets face now. But they happened nonetheless. At 1-0, with 16 games still to play, that’s really the only thing the Jets can hope for.
It’s funny: what’s easiest to remember now for Jets fans is 1999, when Vinny Testaverde eerily suffered a similar kind of opening-game Achilles injury Rodgers did. That season was also a worst-case model for this season: the Jets started 0-3 and 1-6 before Bill Parcells replaced Rick Mirer with Ray Lucas and the Jets finished 6-2 to end up 8-8.
But the exact same day that Vinny went down — Sept. 12 — something remarkable was happening in St. Louis. Thirteen days earlier, the Rams’ grandiose title plans were seemingly destroyed when Rodney Harrison cheap-shotted Trent Green in an exhibition game, blowing out Green’s knee. A day later, Dick Vermeil was still crying about Green — literally — when he told Kurt Warner the job was his.
“That’s just his way,” Warner would remember with a laugh a few years later, when he was with the Giants, “but it’s sort of a heck of a way to find out you’re now a starting quarterback in the NFL.”
Warner became the Powerball-winning example of taking a sad song and making it much, much better. In his first start, he ransacked the Ravens for 309 yards and three TDs, and he wound up with 4,353 yards and 41 touchdowns that year, dropped into a lineup on a team that, like the Jets, had superior talent at the offensive skill positions and a top-5 defense.
“We didn’t ask him to save us because we didn’t need him to save us,” Vermeil would say almost five months later, after the Rams beat Tennessee, 23-16, in Super Bowl XXXIV. “But he saved us anyway.”
A lot of Mike Livingston’s teammates would sing a similar song about the otherwise obscure and erstwhile third-stringer on the 1969 Chiefs. Starter Len Dawson banged up his knee in Week 2, and was feared lost for the season. Backup Jacky Lee broke his ankle in a Week 3 loss to Cincinnati. The Chiefs turned their season over to Livingston, second-year man out of SMU, with zero career pass attempts under his belt before relieving Lee.
They did so cautiously.
“If you had an arm, Hank [Stram] brought you in,” Livingston said, something Wilson will probably see the Jets do until he gives them a reason not to. “I knew right there that I wasn’t going to come out, no matter how bad I was hit, no matter how bad I was hurt. If I did, you might not ever see me again.”
Before his first start, at Denver, veteran safety Johnny Robinson told Livingston, “Listen, just do what you can do, let us win the game. Or we’ll have to cut your nose off.”
“Only,” Livingston said, laughing, “he didn’t say ‘nose.’ ”
The Chiefs won that game. They won the next four, too, and then again in Buffalo late in the year when Livingston got his sixth and final start. They finished 6-0 in those games, and would beat the Vikings in Super Bowl IV, 23-7.
“I was MVP of the Super Bowl,” Dawson told me many years later. “But Mike was MVP of the most important part of our season.”
Earl Morrall twice excelled at what Wilson is being asked to do, filling in for Johnny Unitas in Baltimore in 1968, and again for Bob Griese in Miami in 1972, and it’s not like that was easily forecastable when he went 1-5-1 as a Giants starter in 1966. Jeff Hostetler had thrown exactly 93 passes in almost five mostly invisible years as a Giant when suddenly he was asked to steer the Giants toward their second Super Bowl in 1990.
He went 5-0, including a 20-19 win over Buffalo in the Big Game.
Twenty-seven years later Nick Foles would perform a similarly wondrous job replacing Carson Wentz with the Eagles.
“There were a lot of people waiting for me to screw up,” Hostetler said in the postgame craziness on Jan. 27, 1991.
“And they’re still waiting!” added teammate Ottis Anderson, into the same microphone.
There’s the template. There’s the gold standard. There’s what Jets fans hope Wilson (and, say, Breece Hall) are saying into a microphone sometime after the weather turns frosty.
