New York Jets roundtable, predicting Gang Green’s 2019 win total
By Ed Stein
John Carroll Jr., Empire Writes Back and DraftKings
I think the Jets will win a total of seven games. This isn’t meant to knock the New York Jets or discredit everything they’ve done this offseason. They had a fantastic offseason by getting LeVeon Bell alone. It’s just when you look at the beginning of their schedule, it’s tough for me to see it and think things will go well early on.
Gang Green still has a new coach and new general manager, who didn’t draft the players on this roster. While it’s nice to see they made plenty of improvements, the window for those to kick in, even with an inevitably better Sam Darnold, isn’t that large. They open the season against the Bills and Browns. Both of those games are toss-ups, due to them being on the same page, and in the same phase of a rebuild as the Jets.
After that, they play the Cowboys, Eagles, Patriots twice, and Jaguars. All of those tough games are in the first half of the season. While crazy things happen, it’s hard to say if the Jets can win even three of those games. It’s the second half of the schedule where they will get their most wins, I say four to five alone.
They play the Dolphins twice, I don’t think the rebuilding Bengals will be very good, and the Giants. A struggling Oakland team can also help them get a win. That’s a potential game where Gang Green could see Sam Darnold take over and get them the win.
Who knows? I think for the Jets to get to nine wins, it would take them staying 100% healthy and teams like the Eagles and Cowboys having a significant fall-off early to get some surprise wins.
Having a fourth-place schedule based on last year does not help the Jets much for this year. There will be an improvement from the last-place teams. Gang Green is one of those teams. But it could very well take 10 wins to get the playoffs in the AFC and I don’t think the Jets come close to that.