NY Jets lead NFL in player arrests over last 18 months
What do you do if you see a member of the New York Jets in your neighborhood?
Well, for far too many of them over the past year-and-a-half, the answer to that question has been to call the C-O-P-S COPS COPS COPS on them.
ESPN‘s Rich Cimini reported that eight members of Gang Green have been arrested over the past 18 months, making them the team in the NFL that has drawn the most penalty flags from real-life referees in that span.
Two players — Chris Herndon and Dylan Donahue — got nailed for alleged DUIs; Donahue managed that one twice.
Another two — Lorenzo Mauldin and Darrelle Revis — got picked up for alleged assaults.
Rashard Robinson, meanwhile, was arrested on a drug charge.
And Robby Anderson, apparently no better at getting away from police than he is at avoiding tacklers after the catch in his wide receiver role, got tagged first for resisting arrest and then, later, for eluding police.
To be fair, three of those charges were dropped; both of the assault charges plus Robinson’s alleged game of real-life cops and robbers were struck from the record if not from the back pages of the newspapers.
Some are blaming coach Todd Bowles for this spate of bad behavior; since he took over in 2015, only the Packers (10) have had more total arrests than the Jets (nine).
But Bowles isn’t the one accused of actual wrongdoing. That’s on the players themselves.
Still, Bowles doesn’t seem to want to accept responsibility for the role coaches have in creating accountability within their organizations.
“There’s nothing wrong with the disciplinary process,” Bowles said following Herndon’s arrest. “The arrests are going to happen and you deal with them as they come.”
He might as well have said “my team has character issues and that’s why we haven’t made the playoffs on my watch.”
Bowles also deflected on the drunk driving issue, saying, “It’s not a Jets problem or a league problem. It’s a nationwide problem.”
While he’s not wrong — according to the Centers for Disease Control, 10,497 people in the United States were killed by drunk drivers in 2016, and on average in America, a person is killed by a drunk driver every 50 minutes — a true leader does not simply deflect blame and engage in whataboutism rather than actually do something about the problem.
Everything here is terrible optics for the Jets.
They went 5-11 in 2017, the second straight year they’ve posted that abysmal record, and they now have a losing record in Bowles’ three-season tenure (20-28).
When you mention the Jets to the average fan, the fan’s response is to think of the “Butt Fumble,” a term so ubiquitous that it has its own Wikipedia article that’s over a thousand words long. There are particle physics articles on Wikipedia shorter than that.
In 59 regular seasons in franchise history, the Jets have a losing record (397-479-8). Even if they went 16-0 each of the next five years, they would end the 2022 season below .500 all time.
And now they’re that team with players getting arrested left and right and a coach who doesn’t care.
Keep doing you, Jets. The 50th anniversary of Super Bowl III is coming up in January, so at least you’ll have that one shining moment in franchise history that happened before most of your fans were born.
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