Former Jets and Giants who have a shot at winning the Super Bowl this year
From left: The Seahawks' Leonard Williams (fomer Jet and Giant), the Eagles' Saquon Barkley (former Giant) and the Seahawks' Sam Darnold (former Jet). Credit: Getty Images/Lachlan Cunningham; Gregory Shamus; Jared C. Tilton
Sauce Gardner said he was “running in circles in my house, I was so happy” when he was traded from the Jets to the Colts in early November.
He told reporters in Indianapolis about the “tough times, rough times” he had endured with the Jets, three-plus years of losing.
“Things have changed in the matter of a night,” he said, beaming.
Quinnen Williams, who went from the Jets to the Cowboys the same day, had a somewhat similar reaction.
“It’s unbelievable to be able to come to an organization with so much history and so much talent on the team,” he said upon arriving in Dallas. “I’m super-excited to be part of a team and an organization that is going to win and going to do good things. I want to be part of a winning culture.”
They had every reason to believe they were leaving Gang Green for greener pastures. At the time of the deal, the Colts were 7-2 and the Cowboys were 3-5-1. The Jets were 1-7.
The NFL playoffs began this weekend, and while the Giants and Jets are not participants, plenty of their former players are. The 14 postseason rosters are speckled with recognizable names, those who managed to get out and find success elsewhere. But Gardner and Williams? Just like their former team, they’ll be home watching.
The overtones of those deals were simple: The Colts and the Cowboys were all-in on making a postseason push; the Jets were going to focus on their future with the draft picks they collected.
Well, a little more than two months later, the Jets are the clear winners. They still have those picks with which to build their coming seasons. The Colts and Cowboys? Gardner and Williams? They didn’t get anything for which they hoped.
Things got so bad for Indianapolis, in fact, that Gardner — who missed several games with the Colts because of injury — participated in only one victory all season and none in this country (the only win for him came over the Falcons in Germany).
And Williams? His Cowboys were eliminated from playoff contention in Week 16. They lasted only two weeks longer than the Jets did.
Then again, at least one of the two recorded an interception this season, something nobody on the Jets could do. (And it wasn’t the cornerback.)
While not having to watch those two most recently departed cornerstones vie for a title is some consolation for the Jets — the Giants and their fans, who saw Saquon Barkley lead the Eagles to their Super Bowl championship a year ago, can attest to how empty that feels — it doesn’t exclude them from the nausea.
Many of the teams still playing have rosters speckled with former Giants and Jets, some in the most prominent positions imaginable. Saturday’s game between the Rams and Panthers featured one-time Jet Davante Adams and one-time Giant A’Shawn Robinson. The Packers and Bears, who played on Saturday night, each had a former Giant in the secondary, Xavier McKinney for Green Bay and Nick McCloud for Chicago.
From Barkley, Michael Carter II and possibly Azeez Ojulari in Philadelphia to Evan Engram and John Franklin-Myers in Denver to Bryce Huff and Jason Pinnock in San Francisco — not to mention former Jets coach Robert Saleh as the defensive coordinator for the 49ers — there is a fairly good chance that when the Lombardi Trophy is raised on Feb. 8, it will be a former Giant or Jet who gets to hoist it.
There probably is an algorithm that will say this is not as specific as it seems. Most teams are made up of players acquired from elsewhere, and the fact that there are two teams in this market simply doubles the chances that they will come from here.
But this year, it feels as if the league again has twisted around the famous Sinatra lyrics about New York for the theme song to this postseason: If you can’t make it there, you can make it anywhere (else)!
There is, in fact, one team whose march to a potential title this next month will rankle both local organizations with thoughts of what could have been.
The Seahawks, the top seed in the NFC, have two former Jets first-round picks, one of whom also played for the Giants, and a former Giants draft pick as three of their key players: Sam Darnold, Leonard Williams and Julian Love.
As they were coming off the field after their Week 18 win over the 49ers, Williams and Love, the former Giants teammates from 2019-22, shared a moment of reflection and triumph.
“We embraced,” Love said, “and just said, ‘Man, thank goodness we got here.’ ”
Love and Williams were part of the Giants teams that made the playoffs in 2022 and won a Wild Card game, so their time here wasn’t a total failure. But in the offseason after that run, Love signed with the Seahawks (he had been offered an extension by the Giants during the season but turned it down). During the next season, when the Giants were 2-6, they traded Williams to Seattle.
Williams, who hadn’t made the playoffs in his four-plus seasons with the Jets before being traded to the Giants, said making the postseason with Seattle is far different from the run with the Giants, which he said had a “how did we get here?” vibe.
“Now it’s like we look at each other like, ‘Yeah, we were meant to be here. This was our destiny. This is what’s supposed to happen. We worked hard for this,’ ” Williams said.
“I think one of the only guys on the team that really knows the journey I’ve been on is Julian . . . I’ve just been so thankful to be here and so thankful for this season and just the way everything’s been playing out. It’s just really incredible to be having this type of season toward the end of my career.”
Darnold, meanwhile, continues to haunt the Jets as the quarterback they gave up on too quickly (although to be fair, this season it’s the Vikings — who went from 14-3 with him last season to 9-8 and no postseason berth without him this season — who should feel more chagrined).
As the Jets head into another offseason of uncertainty at the most critical position in the sport, Darnold is one of two starters with ties to the team. The other, of course, is Aaron Rodgers, whose Steelers won the AFC North title and will host the Texans on Monday night. He spent two seasons with the Jets in which they won a total of 12 games and only six of his starts.
“It’s pretty emotional,” Rodgers said on the field after the win over the Ravens clinched his return to the postseason for the first time since the end of the 2021 season. “I’m excited to be going to the playoffs for the first time in a long while . . . It’s been a grinding year, and the two years before that were tough as well.”
At that point, Rodgers smirked. Teammates T.J. Watt and Cam Heyward, who were standing beside him, chuckled.
That’s a common sentiment this January. When Love and Williams shared that hug with each other after the regular season to talk about their time together with the Giants and their journeys to that point, Seahawks general manager John Schneider walked past them.
“And he just shouts out, ‘You’re welcome, guys!’ ” Love said.
Said Rodgers of his time in Pittsburgh: “It’s been an absolute blessing to be here.”
The unspoken ending of that quote from him and many others who will feel the same way in these coming months — and perhaps even Gardner and Quinnen Williams in due time — undoubtedly is “ ... and not with the Giants or the Jets any longer.’’
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
