The Sports Page

Every NFL Team Spends the Same. The Jets Still Can’t Find January.

Baseball at least lets you blame the checkbook. The NFL has a hard salary cap — every team spends inside the same narrow band — so money cannot explain who wins and who rots. What’s left is the organization. And every franchise regresses toward its own mean, not the league’s. The Jets’ mean is under seven wins a year.

The Sports Page · The Columnist · The dog days, and the teams that make them longer

Fifteen years. That is how long it has been since the New York Jets last played a snap in the postseason — the longest active playoff drought not just in the NFL but in all of North American pro sports. And here is the part that should keep an owner awake: the Jets have spent that decade and a half operating under the exact same financial rules as the teams playing in January. Football’s salary cap is a hard ceiling. Nobody outspends anybody by much. The Jets have had, every single year, the same money to work with as the Chiefs and the Eagles. They have simply not turned it into wins.

Every fan of a team like this reaches for the same medicine, and it is real medicine: regression to the meani. A team stuck in the cellar is partly the victim of bad luck, and bad luck moves on. Things should get better. But — as this page argued about a certain baseball team a few days ago — the word doing the quiet work is the mean, and it is not .500 for everybody. Each franchise regresses toward its own level. The only question that matters is where that level sits.

The cap makes it a fair fight. The results aren’t fair at all.

Line up all thirty-two teams by their average wins over the last twenty years and the spread is brutal. The Patriots, across the Belichick era, averaged almost twelve wins a season. The Browns averaged under six. That is a six-win gulf, year after year, between two organizations handed the same salary cap. In a league engineered by its own commissioner to force parity — the same money, a schedule tilted to drag good teams down and lift bad ones up, a draft that hands the worst teams the best players — the gap between the best-run and worst-run franchise is the size of an entire playoff berth. Every year. That is not a money story. There is no money story to tell. It is an organization story.

The Jets regress to the Jets

Find the Jets near the bottom of that chart, twenty-ninth of thirty-two, and the fifteen-year drought stops being a run of bad luck and starts looking like a property of the building. Their gravity is under seven wins a season. When they get a hot start, that is the number that pulls them back down; when they finally hit bottom and land a franchise quarterback, that is the number waiting to reclaim him. Regression to the mean will lift the Jets off the floor, sure — and then set them right back at six or seven wins, because that is what the organizationi is. You do not regress to the contender the cap says you could afford. You regress to the team you keep choosing to be.

Gravity moves — but only when the building does

Here is the exit, and it is close enough to see. A franchise’s mean is not permanent. It moves — but only when the institution underneath it is rebuilt, not redecorated. Look one line up the chart from the misery, at a team an hour up the Thruway: the Buffalo Bills went seventeen straight years without a playoff berth, the longest drought in the NFL at the time, a punchline every bit as worn as the Jets are now. Then, in 2017, they tore the operation down to the studs — new general manager, new coach, a coherent plan, and eventually a quarterback to run it — and the gravity moved. The Bills became a machine that makes January by default. Same state, same cap, same era as the Jets. Different building.

That is the whole lesson, and it is the same one the Cubs taught baseball when they finally broke a hundred-and-eight years, and the Red Sox when they broke eighty-six: droughts do not end because a star arrives or a season turns lucky. They end when an organization stops being the thing it was. Winning is a discipline a building learns. So is losing — and the most cursed-seeming fan bases in sports are not cursed at all; they are watching an institution that has quietly become excellent at one specific skill. The salary cap was supposed to make every team the same. It did the opposite: it stripped away every excuse, and left each franchise alone with the only variable that was ever really theirs. For the Jets, that variable has read the same for fifty-seven years. The season is coming, with all its hope. The gravity has other plans.