When my dad tells people that he’s a fan of the New York Jets, they usually offer sympathy.
The Jets are bad. Really bad. So bad that they haven’t touched the NFL postseason since 2010 when I was 4 years old, and it’s been over 10 years since they’ve had a winning record. My only childhood memories of the Jets are my dad being disappointed year after year by their performance.
Thankfully, I’m free from the curse of the Jets. I didn’t grow up in New York like my dad. Instead, I was born and raised in Los Angeles, where my hometown sports experience was shaped by the Los Angeles Dodgers, a team that has won the World Series three times in the last six years. Some people root for the teams their parents root for, but I’ve never been a Jets fan, and my dad is just fine with that. Despite his lifelong fandom, he doesn’t want to pass on the abject misery of rooting for the Jets.
But that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve grown up with the Jets in my life. After countless Sundays watching them lose and every extended family gathering being filled with commiseration about another poor season, I have some understanding of just how hopeless it is to be a Jets fan.
Here’s the thing, though: My dad may have no hope for the Jets, but every Sunday during football season, he watches them anyway. He cheers when they score a touchdown and groans when they inevitably mess up, and even though they lose far more than they win, he still cares every season, every week, every game.
He still has fun with the failure, though. In high school, I was part of a club where students wrote, directed and acted in short plays. During my senior year, my friend showed me her script, asking for help with one of her jokes from someone who knew about sports. She wanted the main character of the play to be a fan of a football team that never wins anything, and asked which team she should use.
I didn’t hesitate. I told her to use the Jets.
On the night of the performance, I eagerly waited for my friend’s play to begin. My dad was in the audience and I had to see his reaction. Then came the line.
“What? The Chiefs? I was holding out for the Jets to win!”
My dad’s laughter was the first in the room, and the loudest.
But I didn’t really understand how anyone could bring themselves to care about the Jets until I truly came to love sports. Anyone who knows me knows how much I love tennis, which I have followed closely since 2023. What I’ve found is that when a tennis player wins too often, when a title doesn’t feel monumental, when success is never in doubt, I care less. I don’t find joy in watching the overwhelming favorites win. Instead, I’ve gravitated towards the less-perfect players, the ones who are doubted in every match. That said, failure is different between tennis and football, and, honestly, it’s just plain mean to compare any tennis player I watch to the Jets. But my dad watching a fumbled catch is, essentially, the same as me watching a second serve sail long or a forehand hit the net.
My dad rooting for the Jets means watching a loss almost every week of the football season. It means never-ending disappointment. It means failure.
But it makes those rare wins significant. The best team in the NFL winning a game on a random day in September doesn’t amount to much, but the Jets winning that game means everything. And what I’ve learned from my dad is that the joy of watching a failing team succeed is special. It’s once in a blue moon, irreplicable and the payoff of failing again and again and again. The Jets winning a game, no matter the size of the stakes, is proof that sometimes, you have to hold onto the things that disappoint you. My dad is the opposite of a bandwagon fan — when it comes to the Jets, everyone wants to jump off. But he sticks with them, and that makes every small success feel like a monumental victory.
And if, somehow, the Jets ever win the Super Bowl again, it will just mean more for my dad than some hypothetical bandwagon Jets fan (I don’t think anyone like that will ever exist, but still). Sticking with a failure, rooting for it, and most importantly believing, despite everything, that it can succeed may make for a somewhat miserable sports-watching experience, but I think it’s worth it to care.
When I joined The Michigan Daily’s Sports section, I quickly came to understand how important our section’s football team is. Every year, the night before the Michigan-Michigan State football game, the Sports section plays our own football game against The State News — and we’ve won 21 years in a row. It’s a big deal, and when I first joined Sports, I wanted to get more involved, so I decided to go to one of the Friday afternoon football practices.
Anyone on the Sports section can attest to the fact that I don’t know how to throw a football. I can only catch one if it’s coming at me incredibly slowly and even then, it’s dicey. I don’t even own cleats. I showed up to my first State News practice knowing no one there and having absolutely zero football skills or experience.
I failed quite a bit. I couldn’t throw or catch, and at a certain point I became too embarrassed to even try. I was awful on defense, unable to keep up with anyone and frequently allowing catches and runs. And I didn’t even know much football terminology, so when we’d do the huddles to talk about strategy, I would just pretend to understand what they were talking about.
I was by far the worst player there. In other words, I was the New York Jets of The Daily’s football team.
A version of me that didn’t grow up with a Jets fan like my father might not have kept coming back to those practices. I had no way of knowing I would end up playing in the actual game; at that point, all I knew was that I was bad at football. But life lined up so that I knew the value of a football failure. So, like my dad did with the Jets, I stuck with it. I kept going to the practices, and soon I started to understand the plays and even find a position that I was good at: center (at least, the snapping part — I’m still working on blocking). When the State News game rolled around, I was a starter on the offensive line.
I still can’t throw or catch the ball. Some failures are eternal. But one thing I will never forget is the one and only time I picked up yards during practice. The ball was handed off to me, and I ran. Not very fast and not very far, but it was more than I had done before. It was rare, like the New York Jets winning a football game, and somewhere, thousands of miles away, I could almost hear my dad cheering.
Statement Contributor Amanda Bergman can be reached at amaberg@umich.edu.
