NFL: The New York Jets trade for Aaron Rodgers has turned them into a prime time TV attraction

The NFL’s schedule release, scheduled for Thursday night, has turned into an off-season holiday in the football world. For the past decade, though, the Jets haven’t exactly been able to celebrate much. While they languished on the field, the league and its broadcast partners weren’t keen on featuring them.

Since 2012, the Jets haven’t played a single game on a Sunday night, which is typically the league’s most-watched prime time slot. The only other team that wasn’t given a Sunday night game during that period was the Jacksonville Jaguars, who play in one of the NFL’s smallest markets. (The 2012 season was also the beginning of an inauspicious era on prime time for the Jets — that was the season of the infamous “Buttfumble” during a late game on Thanksgiving.)

It’s hard to blame the league’s decision makers for shunning the Jets: Their last playoff appearance was in the 2010 season. That’s not just the longest drought in the NFL by five years, it’s the active record in major American pro sports thanks to recent playoff berths by the NBA’s Sacramento Kings and MLB’s Seattle Mariners.

The Jets haven’t been completely shut-out of prime time, but they might wish they had been: The team’s 6-20 record in its 26 night games since 2012 is by far the worst record in the league in that span. The Jaguars had the fewest such games, and the team with the most in that span just happens to be the one that just traded their marquee asset to New York. Rodgers’s Green Bay Packers were on prime time during the regular season a league-high 57 times since 2012, and that includes 30 appearances on Sunday night alone.

Even before the schedule’s full release, the dynamic is already shifting: the Jets will play the Dolphins in the league’s first game on Black Friday. The showdown, which will be streamed on Amazon, isn’t technically prime time because it will be played in the afternoon but was a hotly anticipated spot as the NFL invades a new day on the calendar.

The Jets being poised to take centre stage isn’t the only new quirk in this year’s scheduling. In addition to the new game on the Friday after Thanksgiving, teams are also now allowed to play twice, instead of just once, on a Thursday after playing on the prior Sunday.

The Jets new-found prominence on the schedule figures to be the biggest scheduling paradigm shift of the year. That’s because there’s finally hope this moribund franchise can contend for a Super Bowl.

The Jets were one of the early surprises of the 2022 season when they were 7-4 and in position snap their streak of playoff misses. Then they finished the campaign in distinctly Jets-ian fashion: they lost each of their six final games.

While the Jets featured one of the league’s best defences and some of the brightest young talents in the sport — wide receiver Garrett Wilson and cornerback Sauce Gardner won the offensive and defensive rookie of the year awards, respectively — they had an enormous problem at the game’s most important position. Zach Wilson, the quarterback they selected second overall in 2021, was supposed to solve that. Instead, he was benched after playing poorly and joined the line of would-be saviours who turned into disappointments for the team.

More Coverage

Why Murtagh’s NFL journey is a boon for Aussie athletes

Shannon Gill

That made acquiring a veteran quarterback the Jets’ biggest off-season priority. Then, after Rodgers entered a darkness retreat thinking he might retire, he decided afterwards he wanted to play for them. That produced a lengthy impasse before the Packers ultimately shipped him off for a haul of picks shortly before the NFL draft.

Now the Jets’ hopes for 2023 rest on Rodgers. And however the experiment turns out, it’s a good bet that the entire country will be able to watch it happen during prime time.

-Wall Street Journal