The “moral victory” label gets slapped on too many losses in every sport but the Jets’ 23-17 defeat to the Texans on Monday night might be just that.
Eight days after a 34-0 drubbing at home to the 49ers, the Jets took on one of the best teams in football and came up a touchdown short of winning the game.
But don’t expect any warm fuzzies from a loss that drops the Jets to 2-3 on the year.
“There’s no moral victories, but we saw improvement. We just have to continue and grow and get better,” defensive end Mike DeVito told Metro. “We needed to come back out this week, but we fell short. We need to start getting some W’s. We got some positives out of it, but now we need wins.”
Even though it counts as a loss, the Jets should find solace in the way they played given the circumstances. Not only were they a week removed from their effort against the 49ers, the offense went into the game crippled without the services of wide receivers Santonio Holmes and Stephen Hill, and tight end Dustin Keller. The offense wasn’t crisp by any means, but they at least moved the ball and quarterback Mark Sanchez was more effective in getting the ball downfield than the week before.
“The objective is to win, so of course everybody is upset. But at the same time, we know that you’ve got to give yourself a chance to win and we did that [Monday night]. Were there mistakes along the way? Absolutely. Can we clean some things up? Of course,” Sanchez said. “I’m proud of the way guys hung in there. You’ve just got to be in it and give yourselves a chance. We did that. We just have to be better in the red zone, as well.”
“At the end of the day we still lost — that’s all that matters,” David Harris said. “We put last week behind us and played better in this game, but came up short.”
Follow Jets beat writer Kristian Dyer on Twitter @KristianRDyer.
