Jets had no choice but to play Josh McCown
The meaningless fourth and final preseason game was a mere seven minutes old, and the Jets’ 2017 season flashed before them as their starting quarterback lay on the MetLife Stadium turf, unable to get up.
Too dramatic?
OK, this wasn’t Vinny Testaverde rupturing his Achilles tendon in the 1999 season opener on a team with legitimate Super Bowl aspirations.
To borrow an oft-used phrase from Bill Parcells, who coached that ’99 Jets team, no disrespect intended to current starter Josh McCown and these 2017 Jets, but they don’t have the same Super Bowl aspirations the team had all those years ago when Testaverde was coming off his 1998 career year.
It really doesn’t much matter who the Jets starting quarterback is this season since the team’s roster has been stripped down to the equivalent of a Triple-A baseball squad.
Still, it was an unsettling — and very Jets-like — scene just 7:47 into the Jets’ 16-10 win over the Eagles on Thursday night, when McCown was drilled by Philadelphia backup middle linebacker Joe Walker, who breezed his way past Jets running back Bilal Powell.
Fortunately, McCown was OK after a few moments on the sideline and he returned after only one play to complete the series.
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“I just got the wind knocked out of me,” McCown said. “He just caught me right in a bad spot. It was a good first hit. You always like to get those over with. Nothing major. Thankfully, it wasn’t anything serious and looking forward to playing next week.”
Had McCown been injured more severely and been knocked out of the game, the second-guessers would have come out of the cracks like cockroaches in an unsanitary kitchen after dark, ripping the Jets for playing McCown.
That would have been a typical knee-jerk reaction by people who simply want to rip the Jets while they’re down.
The truth is Jets coach Todd Bowles was smart to play McCown for the two series he played since he’s going be the starter in the Sept. 10 regular-season opener in Buffalo and had played in only one offensive possession this preseason — in the opener three weeks ago.
“It’s football,’’ Bowles said when asked how he felt when he saw McCown on the ground. “Whether he goes down in the first game of the regular season on three plays or he goes down now, it’s football. You don’t play to get hurt. You play to play.’’
Right tackle Ben Ijanala said: “Anytime I see a teammate down, it catches my attention, and I say a quick prayer. I’m happy to see that he got up, everything ended up all right. You can’t play scared.”
Tight end Austin Seferian-Jenkins said: “My reaction was it’s football and he got hit. Josh is a tough dude. It’s football. People get hurt. He got back in there. Took a play off and got back in there.”
Bowles, who was seen laughing with McCown and backup quarterback Bryce Petty on the sideline minutes after the hit, said McCown “was fine,” adding, “He was just joking around. He’s all good.”
It didn’t look good initially. McCown was off to an efficient start, having completed his first four passes for 36 yards before he was driven to the ground by Walker with 7:13 remaining in the first quarter. He finished the game 6-of-8 for 57 yards, closing the preseason 9-of-12 for 129 yards and a touchdown.
“Josh is a professional. He’s always the same guy,” said Seferian-Jenkins, who caught a touchdown pass from Christian Hackenberg. “The way he practices is the way he plays. What you saw was the way he commands the huddle. That’s how he acts in practice. It was great to have him out there.”
McCown has heard the noise about how historically bad this Jets offense has the potential to be. He understands the negative vibe from the outside but chooses to ignore it.
“It’s easy to look at the circumstances and you have new pieces and pieces that are gone … but when you’re in this, in our situation, we don’t operate under those circumstances, [thinking]: ‘Well, we don’t have this guy,’ ” he said. “We don’t have excuses. There’s a way that we expect to play and we’re going to do that. I put a lot of pressure and expectation on myself to get that done.”