The Jets lost for the seventh time in their last seven tries on Sunday, leaving them at 1-7 halfway through a season that has gone totally off the rails.
The numbers for the first half of the season are as ugly as you’d imagine. The Jets have a -15 turnover ratio and have forced the fewest turnovers of any team in the league, they’ve allowed 22 passing touchdowns while generating just seven of their own. They’ve been penalized a ton, can’t stop opposing offenses in the red zone unless their players start celebrating short of the end zone and just generally look like one of the worst football teams in the league to most people who aren’t wide receiver Eric Decker.
“We’re not a bad football team,” Decker said, via NJ.com. “We just do stupid stuff. It’s something that, at this point, it’s frustrating. All you can do is carry on and keep chopping the wood. I think it’s the mistakes -- that’s the biggest thing I’m going to take from this game. When you turn the ball over so much, when you have penalties, when you just do stupid stuff, you’re never going to win a football game.”
Had this 43-23 loss to the Bills been a hideous anomaly, there might be something to what Decker is saying. When a team consistently makes the same mistakes and shows no ability to correct those mistakes, however, it is hard to come away with another description of the team other than bad. Unless, of course, you want to opt for awful.