Jets Fan Psychosis: Why I Am a Jets Fan

I vaguely remember the first football game I went to with my dad.

It was December 3, 1995 and the New York Jets were hosting the St. Louis Rams. I didn’t know much about the Jets back then. I heard stories about Joe Namath and Super Bowl III, but not much else (there wasn’t much else to know about Jets history as I would eventually learn). The only Jets players I knew at the time were Mo Lewis, Marvin Jones, and Boomer Esiason.

I remember the long car drive there an back from our Long Island home and I remember that it was one of the coldest and windiest places I had ever been. I remember only that the Jets lost (23-20, I had to look that up), one of their 13 losses that season. But my love for the Jets was just beginning.

Like most kids, I obtained my sports allegiances through my genes. My dad likes the Jets, Mets, and Knicks, so I started to like the Jets, Mets, and Knicks. Our only difference is hockey. He likes the Rangers and I like the Islanders.

It was through my dad that I learned how to follow sports: each play’s significance during the game, what all the different stats mean, how the season unfolds into the playoffs and who all the great players and teams of the past were.

But the most important lesson of all was loyalty to your teams.

The Jets haven’t always given myself and the other hordes of fans a reason to stay loyal, but we (the true fans) always come back for more.

Including that first game against the Rams, I have been fortunate enough to go to 12 Jets games over the course of my life, courtesy of different friends and coworkers of my dad.

The Jets have showed their gratitude for my attendance by posting a 9-3 record, losing the three games by only three points each. Even during the Jets' down years, we always seemed to pick a game where the Jets played their best.

In 2003, we went to a game against Jacksonville that the Jets won on a last-second touchdown pass by Chad Pennington (which was being scored as my dad and I were just getting into the car, the only game I remember leaving early) and in 2005 we attended the Vinny Testaverde comeback game against Tampa Bay which the Jets hung on to win 14-12.

I’ve also seen the Jets blow out the Bills twice (2000 and 2002), the Chiefs (2001), the Seahawks (2004, when the Seahawks had Jerry Rice, and he scored what would be his last career touchdown against the Jets) and the Texans (2006).

I don’t think I could ever turn against the Jets because I am afflicted with Jets Fan Psychosis. JFP means you love and loathe the Jets simultaneously. I have come to embrace much of the Jets lackluster history and have come to revel in it.

There are few breeds of fan as crazy as the New York Jets fans. Every one of us has JFP, with the older Jets fans showing more acute signs (have you ever listened to Joe Benigno on WFAN during football season?).

JFP gets you giddy over a trade for an aging superstar even if it has a ton of red flags (ahh, the short-lived Brett Favre era) or talks you into a draft pick you knew to be a horrendous decision.

For younger Jets fans like myself, there is less Jets-related trauma to deal with only light cases of JFP, but it is growing stronger each season. We are like the Red Sox fans before they won the World Series. We think of new and absurd ways that our team can blow a game or a season.

Bill Simmons (ESPN’s Sports Guy) once wrote about Jets fans, describing our perfect Super Bowl as a game in which the Jets would get a big lead, blow it late in the second half, then come back and win it late, giving us the opportunity to be both joyous and livid all at the same time.

Even though he is a Patriots apologist, I think he nailed that one pretty accurately.

We all know Jets fans out there that would find something to complain about after a Super Bowl victory, and would be completely lost if they didn’t have some sort of grievance to air after a game. A lot of that is due to 40 years of unhappy endings, lowered expectations and a couple decades of NFL irrelevance.

Our great regular season victories of recent memory (the comeback against the Dolphins on Monday Night Football, the Thursday Night shootout with the Patriots) are bittersweet because they also make us remember how we collapsed late in those seasons and missed the playoffs.

It’s kind of what makes it exciting to be a Jets fan, and it makes the desire to win burn even hotter.

The Jets are the only New York area team to not win a title or even appear in the title game since they last won the Super Bowl in January 1969 (the title tally since January '69: Yankees-6, Islanders-4, Giants-3, Devils-3, Mets-2, Knicks-2, Nets-2 (ABA titles), Rangers-1).

Jets fans are starved for a title, and we probably wouldn’t know how to react if we ever won. I have not seen any of my teams win a title, but the team I would most want to see win it all is the Jets, especially after the awkwardness of rooting for the Giants to beat the Patriots just so they wouldn’t go undefeated.

Even if my Jets fandom wasn’t passed down genetically, I would have gravitated to them anyway. Nothing is more fun and rewarding than rooting for the underdog. The wins are always sweeter when they are against the odds. I can’t think of any other team in the NFL that represents the underdog better than the Jets.

If that sounds crazy to you, than you’re obviously not a Jets fan.