Over the Jets last 32 games, New York is 10-22, a 0.3125 winning percentage.
Over the Giants last 32 games, New York is also 10-22.
For the Giants, that numbers is a bit backloaded: Big Blue is 4-20 in their last 24 games, and 6-2 in the 8 games before that. By the end of the year, you could envision the Giants going 6-26 over their last 32 games (a 0.1875 winning percentage). The Jets went 5-11 last year, and another 5-11 season is a reasonable guess: that would bring them to 10-22 over their last 32 games.
If that happens, it would mean, on average, New York football would have a 25% winning percentage over the last two years. Which is really, really bad…and also pretty rare. The Jets and Giants may not always be very good, but it’s unusual for both teams to be bad for a notable stretch of time. The graph below shows the trailing 32-game winning percentage for both the Jets and the Giants since 1960. The Jets, of course, are in green; the Giants, in blue.
And what about their average winning percentages for their last 32 games? That’s graphed below: as mentioned above, the average winning percentage for New York football over their last 32 games is 0.3125, but it will likely drop to around 25% by the end of this season.
The middle-to-late ’70s was the darkest stretch for New York football. From October 1975 (so really from about two years earlier) through September 1978, the trailing 32-game winning percentages for the Jets and Giants averaged to under 30% for every single week. For the Jets, this was the tail end of the Joe Namath era, when an over-the-hill Namath went 4-17, and the start of the Richard Todd era, which wasn’t much better. For the Giants, they had Craig Morton — you may recall he had a remarkably unsuccessful stay in New York — followed by the Joe Pisarcik era, which was about as good as the Richard Todd era. In 1976, both teams went 3-11. The Giants were at least 4 games under .500 in every season from 1973 to 1980; the Jets ugly times were more painful but shorter: New York went .500 in ’72, ’74, ’78, and ’79, but 3-11 each year in ’75, ’76, and ’77.
The other nadir of pro football in New York came in the mid-’90s. In 1996, the 0-3 Giants and 0-3 Jets met in the Toilet Bowl. Entering that game, the teams averaged a 0.297 winning percentage over their trailing 32 games, but it would go lower. In 1995 and 1996, the Giants went 5-11 and then 6-10. The Jets went 3-13 and then 1-15, for an average trailing 32-game winning percentage of 0.234. For the Giants, Dave Brown started all 32 games, while five different Jets quarterbacks started at least three games during this stretch.
It’s unlikely that the Jets and Giants will reach that low, but there is another mark in site. The Jets and Giants have never had back-to-back seasons, at the same time, where each team won fewer than 33% of their games. But unless the Jets or Giants get to 6 wins, 2017/2018 will mark the first time that has happened. The graph below shows the winning percentage in each season for both teams; for 2018, I put a black dot at 5-11 for the Jets and 4-12 for the Giants.
About every 20 years — the back half of the ’70s, the back half of the ’90s, and the back half of the ’10s — the Giants and Jets are both really bad for a sustained period of time. For New York sports fans, their only hope is that it doesn’t happen again for another two decades.