Have New York’s Football Teams Finally Hit Rock Bottom?

Misery and gloom are haunting the Giants yet again this football season. But there is one consolation: At least they aren’t the Jets.

It is not even Thanksgiving, and it already feels like football season is over in New York. Neither team has been mathematically eliminated from the playoffs yet, but the Jets are 3-8 and the Giants are 2-8.

Jets and Giants fans who had reserved Sunday afternoons for football are now free to head to brunch.

For the Giants, who won only six games last year, the awful season is not completely unexpected. But Jets fans had high hopes this year. With a talented roster and a healthy future Hall of Fame quarterback, the team went into the season with the 10th-best odds of winning the Super Bowl.

But the Jets have long put the “NY” in agony.

“I’m talking about the most beleaguered fan base in professional sports today, and it’s not even close,” said Joe Benigno, the longtime WFAN radio host and even longer suffering Jets fan. “It’s not debatable anymore.”

Benigno, 71, has been a devoted fan since 1965, when the Jets acquired Joe Namath out of Alabama and won the Super Bowl only four seasons later. But whatever magic they had soon morphed into a half century of torment under a bizarre affliction of incompetence and dysfunction that Benigno sums up as “laughingstock-itis.”