Geno Smith had his jaw broken today by a rookie teammate, a defensive end coming to collect $600 Smith owed him. a I spent some of the morning trying to figure out if the New York media turns the Jets and Mets into punchlines or if they do it themselves. I suppose it’s a little of both.
More interesting to me, the sports history nerd, is that Geno isn’t the first Jets QB to suffer a broken jaw.
In 1967, in a bloodfeud game against the Oakland Raiders, Joe Namath got physically tortured; hit low, hit late, hit hard. The Raiders that day were vicious and cheap, and Ike Davidson caught Namath as he was rolling to his left, blowing his helmet off his head and breaking his jaw.
Namath stayed in the game and threw for 370 yards in the Jets loss. Al Davis added insult to injury by having a photo of the hit blown up and displayed at Raiders HQ.
The OG Jets QB with the broken jaw. Namath later said he broke it on a tough piece of steak for whatever reason pic.twitter.com/CGfRCpbufZ
— Matt Walks (@mgwalks) August 11, 2015
Instead, we got Geno’s lame Terminator Instagram picture. I was born in the wrong decade.
Postscript: The Jets’ big opportunity for revenge came during the infamous “Heidi Bowl,” when NBC executives chose to cut away from a narrow Jets/Raiders game to broadcast a heartwarming TV movie about an orphan girl.
It’d be like if ESPN inexplicably started showing the new Annie movie during Monday Night Football.
NBC’s half-hearted attempt to make ameliorate the situation blew up in its face when it displayed the score of the game –revealing Oakland’s dramatic comeback win — across the screen during the movie’s emotional climax.