Jets' QB change? Yawn! Now, if it was Brady Cook getting the start . . .
Jets quarterback Brady Cook during a preseason game against the Philadelphia Eagles at MetLife Stadium on Aug. 22. Credit: Ed Murray
Wake me when Brady Cook is named the starter.
That will be the only quarterback change that registers as remotely interesting for the Jets this season. This week’s transition from Justin Fields to Tyrod Taylor after a month-long dance that was delayed by Taylor’s knee injury and the Jets actually winning two of the three starts Fields salvaged from that untimely tweak certainly does not.
Fields and Taylor are both good guys. It’s nice that Fields got the opportunities to somewhat redeem himself after owner Woody Johnson trashed him publicly at the league meetings on Oct. 21 (which is right around the day that the team almost certainly decided to start Taylor against the Bengals as long as he was healthy enough to do so… which he was not). That would have been an awful way to cap his brief time here.
Taylor’s career has been filled with so many missed opportunities due to injuries and other circumstances beyond his control, be happy he gets this chance to go out and lead a team. That this week it comes against the team that drafted him in 2011 makes it kind of a full-circle moment. Sportswriters do so love good narratives.
But it doesn’t really matter because neither of them will have anything to do with how the Jets look next year, and the team has already told us that is what matters now. They did so when they traded Sauce Gardner and Quinnen Williams and started amassing the draft capital to make a big splashy pick and land their quarterback of the future either this spring or the next.
Arguing between Fields and Taylor is like having a discussion over whether Martin Van Buren or Chester A. Arthur was a better President. Who cares? Both were ultimately inconsequential and both are relegated to ancient history. These quarterbacks are definitely the former and will soon be the latter.
Cook, who has spent this season on the practice squad, is at least a bit of a mystery. He is an undrafted rookie out of Missouri who has yet to appear in a regular-season game although he did dress as the backup twice.
Will Cook be the long-term answer? Probably not. But at some point this season the Jets may put him out there to find out for sure. He’s not named after the Hall of Famer who made his inauspicious NFL debut for New England against the Jets about three weeks before Cook was born in 2001, but the fact he and the patron saint of overlooked quarterbacks who come from almost nowhere to blossom into all-time greats share a moniker has to give Cook at least a cosmically comic chance to be the next big-time Brady.
“When you are on the practice squad that’s why you prepare, why you stay in shape,” Cook told Newsday back in September when he was promoted to backup the week Fields missed with a concussion. “I’ll be ready if needed.”
Until then, we’re left with the Fields and Taylor. Or, as they now are apparently known, Taylor and Fields. At least the Jets are making the right choice here. Fields’ play was unwatchable and unsustainable. Might the conversation be a bit different about him had AD Mitchell and Jeremy Ruckert held on to key passes thrown their way Thursday night against the Patriots? Maybe. But it would have just prolonged the inevitable.
Playing armchair psychoanalyst — add that to the list we began earlier of things sportswriters love — it’s worth noting that the game in which Fields played some of his best ball was the one in which he didn’t seem to have much time to think about his role. That pre-bye week game against the Bengals was, from all indications, going to be Taylor’s start. Then late in the week he was scratched and Fields had to play. Fields completed 21 of 32 passes for 244 yards and a touchdown in that 39-38 victory. In the two games since, he completed the same 21 passes combined for a mere 170 total yards. Fields has talent but there has always been an overthinking aspect that seems to trip him up.
Taylor is the opposite in that regard. He plays loose and free. Sometimes to a fault, as we saw at Tampa Bay in Week 3, his only other start during his two seasons with the Jets. He threw two touchdown passes in the fourth quarter to almost rally the Jets, but he also lost a fumble and threw a pick-6 in the second quarter that led to 10 points for the Bucs in a game that ended in a 29-27 Jets loss.
“You know what you are going to get from him,” Ruckert said of Taylor.
He meant that as a compliment, of course, talking about the steadiness and experience Taylor brings whether he is playing or not. But those words also serve as an out-of-context damnation of the Jets’ current quarterbacking situation.
We do know exactly what we are going to get. From either of them. There may be glimpses that wiggle outside those expectations and even moments which carry or inspire the team to victory in random games, but neither gives the Jets the long-term answers they are craving. They will always return to their mean.
One day the Jets will put a quarterback on the field who can challenge the preordained par that Taylor and Fields both bring with them. Maybe it’s the kid already on the team, more likely it is someone playing elsewhere in the NFL or college this season.
Until then, any choice between the two main options they have must be met with yawns rather than yippees.
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.
