How Rich Kotite's Jets Made Me the Fan I Am Today

In 1995, I started watching football much more seriously than I had before. I had been devoted fan of the Yankees since 1992, the Rangers since 1993, and the Knicks since 1994. With all the success these franchises were having at the time, I could be accused of front-running if I wasn’t from New York City.

Of course, it didn’t help my case that the Packers, a team I was already destined to be loyal to, were doing well at the time.

In fact, not even my college football team, the Columbia Lions, whose football team was best remembered for “The Streak” in the 1980s, could help fully bring me crashing down to sports loser reality. This was the era of Marcellus Wiley, future NFL Pro Bowler and record contract signee, who in 1997 led the Lions to their one good season in my time rooting for them.

So I was ridiculously spoiled as a sports fan at a young age, and in desperate need of a team that would be my own personal whipping boy, a team that showed me sports fandom was not about winning or losing, but absolutely, unwavering loyalty, no matter how badly your team sucks.

To that end, the Jets of the Rich Kotite era were a godsend.

In reality, when I started watching football in the 1990s, I rooted for the Packers, Jets, and Giants with equal passion. This is less of an egregious act in the New York sports culture than dual Yankees-Mets fandom. Yet, football at the time was still something of a third or even fourth sport for me: remember, this was when the Knicks weren’t the embarrassment of the American sports establishment.

When I became a more devoted fan later in my life, I eventually filtered out the Giants, and the Jets eventually even overtook the Packers as the apple of my football eye. In the mid-90s, the Giants, locked in the Dave Brown era, were not that much more successful than the Jets.

What the Jets provided, however, was a team so remarkably bad at every level, from the owner’s box through the front office down to the third-string long snapper, that nothing they did after that could surprise me.

There have been several Jets heartbreaks in seasons after Bill Parcells took over in 1997, and last season’s may have been the worst of them all, as it compromised just about everything I have loved about football: Brett Favre, fleeting dominance, not rooting for your opponent, holiday cheer.

But a five-month relationship that ends in heartbreak is nothing compared to a violent, emotionally abusive two-year relationship, where every week you think things will turn around, and every week, it just gets more and more agonizing. Pete Carroll’s later success at USC was not that much of a surprise to me: During the Rich Kotite years, Carroll may as well have been Bear Bryant by comparison.

In 1995, Carroll was fired after one season and a 6-10 record for a Jets team that hadn’t won more than eight games in a season since 1986, the year I was born. There uniforms will still in the ugly puke-green era, and the most notable accomplishment of a Jet I had witnessed to that point was Dennis Byrd learning to walk again.

Suffice to say, the Jets were already a joke, and the fact that the Jets were hiring Kotite, the coach who had orchestrated an epic regular season collapse by the Eagles the year prior to being hired, only reinforced the fact.

At best, Jets fans were hoping to get a display of fabulous mediocrity, a coach who led us to 6-8 wins the next two or three seasons before he was fired for a real coach.

We were right on the timing and the ultimate result, but the two years in between turned out to be a level of hell Dante forgot.

What was so shocking about the Jets’ awfulness in that era was how even a team expected to be crappy still somehow managed to underachieve. OK, the Jets had terrible game planners, offensive and defensive schemers, and late game strategists.

Yet, they still had poured enough money into the team where the few talented players could make something happen, right? As it turned out, Kotite’s skills were so bad that he could even turn our best player, a former MVP at quarterback who was still only 34 years old, into a crappy, frequently injured sad sack.

His replacement, Bubby Brister, seemed to have a perfect name to define this stage at the Jets era—in fact, I’m tempted to believe Kotite brought him to the Jets from the Eagles based on his name alone. Thank God Brian Griese got the starting job over Brister after Elway retired; if Bubby Brister had gotten it, there may not be a Denver left today.

In 1996, we turned to a more recent Super Bowl quarterback (and Super Bowl loser) in Neil O’Donnell, and the results were even worse: Six games, Four (four!) touchdown passes,  seven interceptions, and 67.8 QB rating.

After the failures of Frank Reich and Glenn Foley, Jets fans actually missed Brister. What was particularly frustrating about these two seasons was that the roster did have players who would later become proven talents, but were wasted in the prime of their careers: Mo Lewis, Richie Anderson, Victor Green, Marvin Jones, and Aaron Glenn were all key parts of the Parcells-era Jets.

Unlike in later Parcells takeovers, there was not as massive a roster overhaul in 1997. The fact that Parcells could succeed so tremendously with more or less the same supporting cast is why Jets fans consider Kotite one of the worst coaches in NFL history.

In fact, Kotite, like Isiah Thomas a decade later, was not a bad evaluator of talent. He added rookies like Ray Mickens, Wayne Chrebet, and even Hugh Douglas; trading Douglas was probably the biggest misstep of Parcells’ tenure with the team.

That’s why I don’t castigate Kotite for his job at the NFL draft, even though he is responsible for the most definitive image of Jets’ draft day disasters (“We want Sapp! We want Sapp!”... “With the 9th pick, the Jets select…Kyle Brady!”). Hugh Douglas, the who came just seven picks later, was a forgotten victory of that draft.

It could be argued that the worse draft day occurred the next year, picking Keyshawn Johnson No. 1 overall the next year, ahead of Marvin Harrison, Eric Moulds, and Terry Glenn. With the first pick of the second round, the Jets picked Alex Van Dyke, ahead of Mushin Muhammad, Amani Toomer, and Terrell Owens.

One bust TE and a Pro Bowl DE over a Hall of Fame DT looks a lot better than selecting two wide receivers in the fist two rounds, neither of whom turned out to be in the top five of receivers selected that year.

Which is all to say that once the Jets became good in the Parcells era, and a mixed bag after that, I took every victory to heart, having felt like I had earned it more than any other team I rooted for.

Not only that, but the Jets prepared me for the devastation the James Dolan era would bring to the Knicks and the pre-lockout Rangers. I would probably not be as much of a sports fan anymore if I hadn’t had the Kotite Jets to put things in perspective; hell, I may even not like the Yankees without that perspective. 

Despite having gone nearly a decade without one of my teams winning a championship, and despite the fact that I passed an age and maturity level when most young fans stop caring, I still obsess over sports as much—or even more so—than when I was in the fourth grade.

Thank you, Rich Kotite, for being the pathetic excuse for a human being I so sorely needed.