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Jets owner Woody Johnson has balls.
I’m ready to drop Jets season tickets I’ve had in my family for more than 50 years after Gang Green and the uncontested worst owner in professional sports announced Tuesday ticket prices for most seats next season are going up – again.
Of course, in same-old-Jets fashion, the franchise waited just two days after rookie head coach Aaron Glenn and the team finally won a game. As if a 1-7 record, rather than 0-8, was a key selling point.
The Jets are headed toward a 15th consecutive season of missing the playoffs – the longest drought in North American pro sports – and there’s little hope things will improve anytime soon.
Perfect timing to boost ticket prices for a third straight year.
What are they smoking in Florham Park?
If the price hike wasn’t enough, Gang Green’s front-office grinches want fans to start paying for next season’s seats this season — beginning in early December, right before the holidays.
Sure Woody, let’s put our gift-giving and family feasts on hold while we dump another billion into the Johnson & Johnson coffers.
Whatever happened to the days of ticket invoices going out in May?
For the record, the price of my two lower end-zone seats in section 101 increased 45% — from $137.50 per seat, per game, to $200 — following price bumps in 2024 and this season.
I was spared the latest ticket hike – which will average 3.5% and run $5 to $10 extra per game for more than half the 82,500 seats at MetLife Stadium.
However, that didn’t stop me from calling a Jets account manager Thursday and requesting my credit card be removed from the automatic payment plan.
I told him ticket prices should be going down – not up – and the Jets can wait until I decide in the offseason if this Dumpster fire of a team — which, regrettably, I still love dearly — is worth bleeding my bank account dry for.
The staffer blamed the ticket hikes on the NFL being a revenue-sharing league that recommends teams routinely raise prices to reach a specific median.
I started attending Jets games as a child shortly after my father – a die-hard Giants fan — got season tickets in 1974, and it’s a tradition I’ve cherished for decades, even after my aging dad became physically unable to attend games.
But I have begun to realize that there’s little benefit to being a season-ticket holder anymore.
There’s no longer a huge waiting list to become one, and tickets can typically be had for half price or lower on secondary market sites like StubHub – especially later in the season when the weather is colder and the Jets are inevitably out of the playoff picture.
The personal seat licenses (PSLs) I and other suckers shelled out thousands of dollars for — to help fund the construction of MetLife Stadium — are now worthless after once being touted as investments. Demand for tickets has plummeted so badly since the mediocre venue opened in 2010 that you no longer need a PSL to buy season tickets.
I understand Woody Johnson is running a business — he cunningly used the arrival of legendary QB Brett Favre in 2008 to spur PSL sales, but Favre was long gone by the time the MetLife opened. He pulled the same bait-and-switch in 2023 with the trade for Aaron Rodgers, and subsequent hike in ticket prices. The Rodgers dream ended four snaps into his first game, when he ruptured his Achilles.
So after nearly 23 years without a home playoff game, we find ourselves at the start of yet another rebuild. I’ve seen many, and I can endure another.
What I cannot stomach is paying Saks Fifth Avenue prices at the 99 Cents store.
