In this week’s edition of the boss’s email newsletter — Kristol Clear (sign up for free!) – Bill Kristol looks back on the sad fate of his New York Jets:
In a fine column over a week ago in the Washington Post, Thomas Boswell asked why sports attract us so powerfully?
How right Boswell is. To prove his point, a couple of days after Boswell’s column appeared, the New York Jets upset the New England Patriots in overtime, due in part to a bizarre call at the coin toss at the beginning of overtime by the Patriots’ captain. This win cleared the Jets’ road to the playoffs; all they then had to do was to defeat the lowly Buffalo Bills on the last week of the season. Which the Jets failed to do, the Steelers won, and the Jets (though with a season way above expectations) fell short of the playoffs. Who would have predicted the Jets would beat the Pats…and then fall to the Bills? But it happened.
This is one reason sports is great–a remarkable mixture of skill (and therefore to some extent predictability) and fortune (and therefore unpredictability), themselves
