“The Drive”: A Few More Details
Many teams have one series of plays that are remembered fondly as “the drive.” Usually, a team might want something late in a game or late in a season to be so honored. Who’s to say the Jets won’t have a better drive later this year, but for now, their 19-play, 74-yard, 11:48 march to their second-quarter field goal at Tennessee will do just fine,
The 19th play of the drive was Jason Sanders‘ first FG as a Jets kicker. Reliable records going back to the Jets’ first season of 1963 show that the team has had only one 21-play drive, ending in a FG by Jay Feely early in the Jets’ “Win And We’re In” 37-0 blanking of the Bengals in their 2009 regular-season finale to get into the playoffs. The Green & White also had a pair of 19-play TD drives, vs. the Packers in 1981 and the Bengals in ’93. All three were home victories.
Drive times are less reliable and in many cases not even available as we go back into the AFL of the 1960s. The best way to describe the 11:48 time of the march (none of the 18 scrimmage plays gained more than 9 yards) is that it is the longest Jets drive in any game since the 1970 merger season. It eclipsed the 11:23 FG drive for the Jets at New England in 1999.