This is a column about a 6-8 football team that failed to make the playoffs, and you may legitimately question the need for a column about a 6-8 football team that failed to make the playoffs, but let's be real: There are only a few days before Christmas, and nobody in your office is doing any real work anyway. That guy next to you has been looking at khakis on the J.Crew website since mid-October. Three other co-workers went out to a long holiday lunch and never came back. Someone in sales just ate the gingerbread house in the lobby. Not part of the gingerbread house. The whole house. It was built in 1979.

This is a column about the New York Jets. I don't know why people get furious at the New York Jets. They are the most entertaining team in football. Jim Carrey hasn't made a classic comedy in ages, and Adam Sandler's looking for one as well, but the Jets keep cranking out the laughs, week after week, like a hardworking vaudeville revue. The jokes are broad and accessible. Football likes to view itself as a sophisticated, intricate endeavor, but the Jets play a type of football a toddler could love. The quarterback—he ran into a guy's butt, and fumbled!

Monday, the Jets lost their eighth game of the season, to the Tennessee Titans. Both of these teams had as much of a chance of winning the Super Bowl as the Milwaukee Brewers, but the game was still a spectacle, because of the manner in which the Jets unraveled. Once again, the focus became the inefficiencies of New York's fourth-year quarterback, Mark Sanchez, who led the Jets to consecutive AFC championship appearances in the first two seasons of his career, but since then has regressed, as if his internal clock has rotated backward, like Benjamin Button's. Sanchez threw four interceptions in the game, and that happens to the best of them—Tom Brady has done it six times—but Sanchez's misfires can be excruciatingly laborious and forced. At times, Sanchez looks less like a professional quarterback throwing a football to his receivers, and more like a hotel guest flinging chair cushions off of the balcony into the pool.

A day later, Ryan announced that Sanchez would not be the quarterback for the season's penultimate game, that this Haz-Mat assignment would go to third-stringer Greg McElroy. McElroy is young and did lead New York to a modest 7-6 victory over Arizona a couple of weeks ago, but the team didn't even make him eligible to play against Tennessee. Watching the Jets make personnel decisions is like watching a manic person make a casserole out of items found in his car's glove compartment. It's all madness, no method.