The Joe Judge era reached a crossroads following Thursday night’s loss to Washington, a game that hinged on a special teams penalty that allowed Dustin Hopkins to get five yards closer for a game-winning field goal.
Through the ebbs and flows of a season, so many of these changes in fortune, both positive and negative, build atop one another to ultimately craft a given year’s narrative. A stretch of solid play can make disappointments like that vanish. A longer stretch of disappointments can make you the Jets or the Lions.
The problem, for Judge specifically, is that when you’ve built a training camp and a program on the idea of perfection, a noticeable lack thereof begins to reflect on your methodology as a leader—especially when some of the most visible errors are those made directly by the coach and his staff.