Being a Jets Fan Now Brings You to Financial Ruin
NY Post - It’s the only thing harder to get rid of than Mark Sanchez — a Jets personal seat license. Fed-up season-ticket holders are desperately trying to unload their PSLs, setting up a potential mass exodus of Jets fans that could become an even bigger challenge for the team than finding a new general manager. The selling of PSLs — pricey licenses for the right to buy season tickets — were used by both the Jets and Giants to help fund construction of the $1.6 billion, 82,500-seat MetLife Stadium they share that opened in 2010. But while Giants fans’ PSLs have gone up in value — their team did just win a Super Bowl last season — Jets fans have seen their investments fall shorter than a Sanchez pass… An owner of four “Coaches Club” PSLs behind the Jets bench paid $30,000 for each seat but is now trying to unload them for $12,000 a pop. Another holder of two nearby seats who paid $60,000 combined is offering his for a total of $20,000.“I’d rather take a hit now on the PSLs than continue paying $14,000 year after year for tickets I can get much cheaper through scalpers,” said a Manhattan banker, who’s trying to dump two “Coaches Club” PSLs for half the price of the $50,000 he paid. The Jets charge an average of $117.94 per ticket for non-premium seats, tops in the NFL
KFC already posted this on the New York site but as the world’s foremost belittler of all things Jets I’d be charged with malpractice if I didn’t mention it here as well. And to tell a story: This weekend I met all the out of town Stool writers for the first time. And KFC and I had a heart-to-heart. Like enemy soldiers in WWI coming out of the trenches to have a cigarette on Christmas, we discovered our common humanity. And honestly, it has finally reached the point where I feel bad not just for my Stool colleague but for all Jets fans. I’ve always considered them silly buffoons worthy of our ridicule, like the Fredo Corleones of football. I’m smaaaht! Not like everybody says! Dumb! I’m smaht and I want respect! The way they go through life always believing they’re one savior away from greatness but that guy always turns out to be just another fraud just gets me. But there reaches a point where even I have to ease off on these poor people. I mean, how much worse can things get? It’s bad enough they get humiliated every week but now rooting for this franchise is making them go broke too? In a bad economy these unfortunate bastards are losing thousands and they’re only sin was choosing the wrong team to fall in love with? It’s the ultimate there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I scenario. Because we were walking in those exact same moccasins for most of my life. It’s easy to forget now but for 30 years the Pats were owned by one bumbling incompetent after another. Amateur, in-over-their-heads morons who treated us like garbage , squeezed every nickel they could out of us and almost never fielded a decent team. It’s only through divine intervention that Mr. Kraft came along with the vision spend his family fortune buying the worst stadium and the worst franchise in all of sports and spin them into gold. Then he passed up the sweetest deal in the world – a brand new ballpark built by the taxpayers of Connecticut and a $1 lease- to build a state of the art stadium without PSLs. And believe me, not for a second have I ever stopped appreciating how lucky we are. As Patton said “I’m a man of many faults, but ingratitude isn’t one of them.”
And just to add insult to injury, the Jets posted a phony, insincere “Thank You” to the people they’ve brought financial ruin to. And as you can imagine, it didn’t go over well:
Well done, Jets fans. And KFC. I’m making a late resolution that in 2013, I’m laying off you all. Your team is another matter altogether. @JerryThornton1