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Keidel: Jets Fans, In All Seriousness, Stop Supporting This Team Financially

By Jason Keidel
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Fan Guy and I have arrived at a detente -- assuming he knows what that is. I have abandoned my crusade to show him his more heinous impulses, to direct his ire at the Jets rather than those of us who tell him how gangrenous Gang Green really is.

No more stream-of-consciousness columns. No more campaigns. Because it was never about being right. It was about being real.

So this is for you, the more measured and logical lot, who can't metabolize another October postmortem, who doesn't make excuses, and doesn't find some existential victory in a slightly competitive defeat. Losing to Denver by just two touchdowns doesn't count as progress.

A true fan -- not the red wine and wind chimes guy who orders sushi or tofu at the trendy sports bar, but the guy or gal who bleeds in team colors -- can no more change their team than they can change their genes or gender.

If you were born with the dubious dedication to the Jets, then that's what you are. It's presumptuous and preposterous to ask you to switch teams. But you can stop feeding, fueling, and funding this disastrous, forlorn franchise that has done nothing but gut you for 44 years.

And it feels like they've reached their nadir now. They are 1-5 with a trip to New England to play Brady and Revis and the inverted momentum and mojo. They are still speaking in the nauseating, corporate cliches about tweaking this diseased, doomed machine into a winner.

Don't listen. Don't attend the games. Don't watch the games. Don't buy the jerseys and trinkets and key chains and doodads that make them so much as a dime. Football is the rare sport that offers a buffet of beautiful games even when your team isn't in contention.

One of my editors chides me for being an "old money" Steelers fan. But I came by my beloved black & gold honestly. My dad was born and raised an hour southwest of Pittsburgh, a few fly balls east of West Virginia, and it was rather easy to rear me on a team that stacked four Lombardi Trophies by my 10th birthday.

But then there was a 25-year title drought, which is lost in the archives because of their recent success.

Chuck Noll's fatal flaw was holding onto the old salt for too long. He saw them through the dynastic prism into the '80s, while the decay cost them a decade. The death blow was drafting Gabe Rivera instead of a local kid from Central Catholic, who dreamed of donning the black & gold since he was a kid.

The Rooneys were drooling at the idea of Terry Bradshaw handing the baton to Dan Marino. But there were whispers of a hard-party lifestyle off the gridiron. The team hired two detectives to dive into his personal life. Not only was Marino not a druggie, he led a crusade for routine drug testing. But Rooney deferred to Noll, and so went the empire.

Marino dropped to the bottom of the first round, and the rest was the rest. And the Steelers plunged down the rungs of relevance. Not until they let Noll go and hired Bill Cowher did the Steelers see the light of contention.

So I spent much of the '80s a safe distance from my Steelers. Still loved them, my blood type still black & gold, still tethered to the laundry, kept one eye on the helmet with the logo on one side of the helmet. But I didn't indulge their incompetence with my allowance money.

So it can be with you and your Jets. Don't indulge them. The NFL's revenue is mushrooming and yet your cable stations are lathered with Gang Green ads begging you to buy the unsold seats in a league that can't count all the money it makes.

Every time you buy a beer or ticket or sweater you are implicitly condoning their conduct, which is nothing short of deplorable. The owner loves the coach, then hires a GM who abhors the coach. The coach admits he can't swap QBs with autonomy. The starting quarterback hits movies instead of meetings, and the backup admits he wasn't prepared to play when summoned.

The Jets were surprisingly competitive on Sunday, making Peyton Manning oddly skittish in the pocket, and were down only a touchdown in the final moments, before Geno Smith's pick-six, which sealed the game and the spread for millions of jubilant gamblers. But in the inverted world of the Jets, there's always a pseudo-victory in defeat, always a sliver lining in a lost season.

Rex Ryan is a dead man walking, and there's no proof that John Idzik can build a winner. He inexplicably left $20 million of cap money on the table. The owner is eternally befuddled. They are lost on both ends of the sport's sacred duet -- head coach and QB. Smith has flashed some talent, but no one is drooling at the idea of this guy leading the Jets over the next decade.

And who will replace Ryan? My former coach (Cowher) would be perfect, but he will balk at Idzik as his boss. The catch-22 is the best coaches want to be GMs and the rookie coaches are a quintessential crapshoot. And New Yorkers are allergic to defeatist terms like "rebuild." And, frankly, pro football is built for the fast rebound. The NFL is the Horatio Alger of team sports, where the outhouse-to-penthouse turnaround is relevant and recent.

If the Saints, the progenitor of the paper-bag fan base, who hid their faces lest anyone know they were losers watching losers, can win a Super Bowl, then the Jets, with all the inherent perks of playing in the media capital of the world, can at least play IN a Super Bowl. Yet they haven't even played for a Lombardi since Woodstock.

And why are you paying for this? Maybe you can't choose your parents or your team but you can edit the content or context or contact you have with them. The Jets operate like your loyalty is monolithic, that you're a sucker who will just jump through the turnstile no matter how they abuse you.

And this is an abusive relationship. You adore the team, are bound to the montage of memories, games you went to in the heat, the cool, and the cold climes, times with your old man, sweating and smiling and shivering with a steamy cup of cocoa between your mittens. You remember Shea Stadium. You remember Richard Todd. You may even remember Namath.

What you can't recall is winning. You have a right to demand a decent product before you make up with them. If you gang up on Gang Green, maybe they will listen. Hit them in the wallet by keeping yours closed. You deserve better. And everyone knows that except the Jets.

Follow Jason on Twitter at @JasonKeidel

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