There is no love lost between these two teams, whose rivalry dates back to the founding days of the American Football League, when the Titans played in the Polo Grounds and Billy Sullivan’s vagabonds played wherever they could find a stadium that would have them.
In subsequent seasons, Jets QB Joe Willie Namath wore white shoes while the overmatched Patriots waved white flags.
In 1979, the first year I covered the Patriots, New York put an end to the Pats’ playoff hopes with a 27-26 win that culminated with the two teams brawling under the lights in Shea Stadium. That was payback for a humiliating, 56-3 rout the Jets had absorbed at the hands of the Pats in Week Two.
A few years later, Don Hasselbeck broke Joe Klecko’s leg in Foxboro, and the enmity between the two teams only continued to increase — doing so exponentially when Bill Parcells, after leading the Patriots to the AFC championship in 1996, abandoned New England to return to New York and coach the Jets.
Turnabout was fair play when, in 2000, Belichick, mere hours after being handed the Jets’ coaching job, announced he was resigning as “HC of the NYJ” in order to take over the Patriots.
