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The New York Jets were reduced to a literal punchline Tuesday, when reserve linebacker IK Enemkpali broke starting quarterback Geno Smith’s jaw at the team’s training camp in a locker room fight over $600.
The incident put Smith out of commission for six to 10 weeks and got Enemkpali cut from the team, but if there’s any franchise in the league equipped to handle a little embarrassment, it’s the Jets, who have been on the wrong end of more than a few regrettable incidents both on the field and off over the years.
It’s been said that Joe Namath made a deal with the devil when the Jets won Super Bowl III in January 1969, and the devil has apparently been cashing in frequently for almost half a century. There are more Jets lowlights at this point than even Fireman Ed can count, but here are 15 of the team’s most memorable.
Lowery slaps ballboy
Enemkpali may be the most recent Jet to serve up a smackdown after getting upset, but he’s hardly the first. One of the more memorable New York forays into hand-to-hand combat took place in 1995, during a 28-23 loss to the Patriots that dropped the Jets to 3-11 on the year. After the defeat, Jets kicker Nick Lowery admitted to slapping 20-year-old Patriots ballboy David Foscaldo in the face during the December game in Foxboro. Foscaldo’s crime? He reportedly refused to give Lowery rubbed-up balls to kick with, handing him cold ones instead. Foscaldo defended his actions, saying it wasn’t his job to make sure the Jets kicker had warm footballs, and after the game, Patriots linebacker Steve DeOssie confronted Lowery, telling him, “If you want to hit someone, hit me.”
Rex toes the line of good taste
Former Jets coach Rex Ryan and his wife put the foot in football.
When it comes to the Jets and embarrassment, hands aren’t the only extremities that get in on the fun. During the 2010 season, homemade foot fetish videos allegedly featuring Rex Ryan’s wife wound up online, to the assumed displeasure of the then-Jets head coach. The outspoken Ryan later dismissed the controversy as “a personal matter,” and the Jets came within a game of the Super Bowl the following month, so it wasn’t all bad. But like Ryan’s recently-altered tattoo of his wife wearing a Mark Sanchez jersey, it was a personal detail that Ryan likely would have rather remained private.
Sanchez goes down in preseason
Speaking of Sanchez, 2015 unfortunately isn’t the first time the Jets have lost a starting quarterback to a major and unexpected injury before the season’s first game. In fact, the last time it happened, it handed Smith the starting job as a rookie. Just two years ago, while Ryan was still the coach, the Jets’ likely starter, Sanchez, was knocked to the ground during the fourth quarter of a meaningless preseason game against the New York Giants. Sanchez landed hard on his shoulder and was diagnosed with a torn labrum, which ultimately required surgery. As a result, Sanchez, the fifth overall pick in the 2009 draft, never played a snap in 2013 and never played for the Jets again.
QB Mark Sanchez ruined his — and the Jets' — 2013 season going after a big win in the fourth quarter of a preseason game.
All hail the butt fumble
Amazingly, that preseason injury is only the second-most memorable mishap of Sanchez’s tenure in New York, and no list of Jets embarrassments and failures would be complete without an ode to the butt fumble, perhaps the most cringeworthy mishap in team history. The play occurred against the Patriots on Thanksgiving night in 2012 and, as the name implies, ended with a Sanchez fumble after sliding into a teammate’s butt. At the time, the Jets were trailing 14-0 in the second quarter after a more traditional fumble led to a New England score when Sanchez took a snap, turned to hand the ball off to a running back who wasn’t there, scrambled and then slid into the backside of right guard Brandon Moore. The contact knocked the ball out of Sanchez’s hands, and the Patriots returned the fumble for a touchdown. To make matters worse, Joe McKnight fumbled the ensuing kickoff, which was also returned for a score. But Sanchez’s plight was most definitely the low point of the 49-19 Jets loss — and maybe the entire history of the team.
Even Fireman Ed can't bring himself to do his thing anymore.
Fireman Ed calls it quits
Earlier, we mentioned Fireman Ed, the Jets’ longtime self-proclaimed mascot and onetime leader of the popular J-E-T-S chant at the team’s home games, but even he’d seen enough after the butt fumble game, which he left before halftime with New York down 35-3. Later that weekend, Ed (full name Ed Anzalone) let it be known that he’d no longer be leading the popular MetLife Stadium chant that he’d been the face of for 27 years “because the confrontations with other Jets fans have become more common” — no doubt a side effect of the team’s play on the field. In the years since, there have been pleas for Anzalone to start leading the chant again, but for now, he says he’s still content just to watch and not participate.
Sal Alosi is tripping
Ryan isn’t the only coach Jets coach to find his name in the tabloids, and sometimes, even assistants get in on the fun. Just ask former strength and conditioning coach Sal Alosi, who infamously used his knee to trip Dolphins defensive back Nolan Carroll as Carroll sprinted down the field in punt coverage during a 2010 game. The Jets ultimately suspended Alosi for the rest of the season and fined him $25,000, and the following February, Alosi resigned. More recently, Alosi was in the news for an alleged altercation with P. Diddy at UCLA, which brought to light rumors that Alosi had once engaged in a fistfight with Jets cornerback Darrelle Revis prior to his 2010 run-in with Carroll.
Lou Holtz passes through
The Jets have had several coaches whose tenures were cut short, but it’s tough to find one much shorter than that of Lou Holtz, who left North Carolina State to take over as head coach of the Jets in 1976. In 13 games, Holtz saw his team get outscored 341-166 en route to a 3-10 record. He ultimately resigned with one game left in the season, telling reporters afterward that, “God did not put Lou Holtz on this earth to coach in the pros.” The following season, Holtz led Arkansas to the Orange Bowl, and the Jets, coached by Walt Michaels, went 3-11 once again.
For one day, the Jets had one of the best coaches in NFL history.
Belichick changes his mind after Jets change theirs
It may be tough to find a Jets coaching tenure shorter than Holtz’s, but it’s certainly not impossible, as Bill Belichick showed us in January 2000. At a time when the Jets were actually not awful, Belichick, then a Jets assistant, was hired to replace Bill Parcells following Parcells’ retirement. Three years earlier, Belichick had been named the Jets interim coach during New York’s recruitment of Parcells but never coached a game. And while the job was Belichick’s for sure this time, he still never coached the team, abruptly resigning after less than a day on the job, citing the team’s change in ownership as the reason. Three weeks later the Patriots hired Belichick, giving up a first-round pick to convince the Jets to release him from his contract — a bargain price for a coach who would become a four-time Super Bowl winner.
Kotite over Carroll
In 1994, the Jets collapsed after a 6-5 start and turned in a disappointing 6-10 season under a 43-year-old first-time head coach named Pete Carroll. Displeased with his former defensive coordinator’s post-promotion effort, then-Jets owner Leon Hess fired Carroll at the end of the year and replaced him with Eagles head coach Rich Kotite, New York’s former offensive coordinator. Kotite called the job “a dream come true,” but most of the next two years were a nightmare as Kotite, who was also named general manager, led the Jets to a 4-28 record, getting the boot with one year left on his contract following a 1-15 season in 1996.
Bubby Brister hands Panthers first win
Speaking of Kotite, one of the low points of his stint as the Jets’ head coach came in Week 7 of the team’s 1995 season. To that point, New York’s only win had been in Week 3 against the expansion Jacksonville Jaguars, but the Jets wouldn’t be so lucky against the league’s other first-year team, the Carolina Panthers. Just before halftime, with the Jets leading 12-6, quarterback Bubby Brister attempted an ill-fated shovel pass that ended up in the arms of Panthers linebacker Sam Mills. Mills returned it 36 yards for a touchdown to take a 13-12 lead into the half, and Carolina went on to win 26-15, the franchise’s first-ever victory.
Mills’ first go-around
The Brister play was bad, to be sure, but by 1995, most New York fans, sadly, were already familiar with Sam Mills’ name. That’s because three years earlier, in a 20-0 Jets loss to the New Orleans Saints on the day after Christmas, Mills executed the most perfect strip of a quarterback that perhaps anyone has ever seen, swiping the ball from Browning Nagle and returning it 76 yards for a touchdown in one swift motion. The ensuing loss dropped the Jets, one year removed from a wild-card berth, to 4-12.
Marino’s fake spike
That 0-5 collapse under Carroll to end the 1994 season might have never happened had the Jets not been duped by a fake spike from Dan Marino in a 28-24 loss to the Dolphins that started the season-ending slide. In that game, Marino — whom Jets fans will recall was still on the board when the team drafted Ken O’Brien in 1983 — already had led Miami back from deficits of 17-0 and 24-6, and then, trailing 24-21 with less than 30 seconds left and the ball on the New York 8, he motioned to his offense that he was going to spike the ball to stop the clock. Instead, he pulled the rug from under New York and threw an 8-yard touchdown pass to Mark Ingram (Ingram’s fourth TD catch of the day) that won the game for the Fins and sent the Jets into a tailspin.
A.J. Duhe smeared mud on the Jets' best hope at a return to the Super Bowl.
Duhe dooms the Jets
Another Miami Dolphin whose name Jets fans will never forget? A.J. Duhe. Following the 1982 players strike, New York went 6-3 during the abbreviated regular season, and after road playoff wins over the Bengals and Raiders, New York found itself in the AFC Championship Game for the first time since the Super Bowl year of 1968. Playing in a muddy Orange Bowl, the Jets and Dolphins were tied 0-0 at halftime, but in the second half, Jets quarterback Richard Todd seemingly couldn’t avoid the Miami linebacker Duhe, who picked off three passes in the Dolphins’ eventual 14-0 win. The first Duhe interception set up Miami’s only offensive score of the game, and the last, with the game still well within reach for New York, was returned 35 yards for a touchdown.
Leon Johnson picks the wrong option
Sometimes it’s New York’s own players who do the damage, and never was that more true than in 1997, when Leon Johnson’s interception on a halfback option doomed the Jets’ playoff hopes in the final game of the regular season. After letting a 10-3 halftime lead over the Lions slip away, New York found itself with a first-and-goal from the Detroit 9-yard line trailing 13-10 midway through the fourth quarter. Rather than play it safe, Parcells dialed up a halfback pass for Johnson, who instead threw it into the arms of Lions defensive back Bryant Westbrook. Detroit held on for the 13-10 win — with Barry Sanders passing the 2,000-yard mark in the process — and the loss dropped New York to 9-7 and in a tie with the Dolphins for the final AFC playoff spot. Guess who won the tiebreaker.
Doug Brien folded — twice — with the playoff pressure on.
Brien misses twice
In 2004, the Jets made the playoffs despite their best efforts to play themselves out of the postseason during the final four games of the season, and after a win in San Diego during the wild-card round, New York traveled to Pittsburgh to play the 15-1 Steelers for a spot in the AFC Championship. After falling behind 10-0 early, the Jets found themselves in a 17-17 fourth-quarter tie, and with 2:02 left to play, Jets kicker Doug Brien stepped up for a 47-yard field goal try. The kick hit the goalpost where the left upright meets the crossbar, but in a twist of fate, a Ben Roethlisberger interception on the next play helped set up another Brien attempt, this time from 43 yards with four seconds left to play. This time Brien missed wide left, and the Steelers went on to win the game in overtime.
You can follow Sam Gardner on Twitter or email him at samgardnerfox@gmail.com.
