I know about playoff droughts. My team went seventeen years without making it. So I am not going to stand here and mock the Jets, who have now gone fifteen straight seasons without so much as a wild-card berth, the longest active drought in all of North American pro sports. I have sat in that exact cold. From the inside, it is no joke.

The last time it was good

The Jets were not always locked out of January. As recently as the 2009 and 2010 seasons they reached back-to-back AFC Championship Games under Rex Ryan and Mark Sanchez, a loud, swaggering team that backed up enough of the talk to scare people. The high point came in January 2011, when they walked into Foxborough and knocked off Tom Brady’s top-seeded Patriots 28-21 in the divisional round. That remains their last playoff win. It is fifteen years old now.

The wandering since

Since that night it has been a parade of failed quarterback fixes and losing seasons, fifteen of them, the 2025 campaign ending at 3-14 and the drought rolling over again. The franchise that produced one of the most famous wins in football history, Joe Namath’s guaranteed upset in Super Bowl III back in January 1969, has spent the last decade and a half unable to win a single January game. One landmark title, and a wait that has outlasted whole careers.

Here is the thing, and I mean it as one sufferer to another. Droughts end. Mine did, after seventeen years, and the relief when it broke was bigger than any one win could explain. Jets fans, you are carrying the heaviest version of it in the sport right now. I will not tell you it is fine. I will tell you it ends eventually, because it has to. Then you get to feel what I felt.