Oops. Do we need to see 14 more of these?

The final score was Jets 24, Patriots 3. Very misleading. It could have been 73-0. The Patriots were being blown out by the Jets.

That’s right. The (gulp) Jets; the team that New England had beaten 15 times in a row before last year’s season finale. The Jets: the Sultans of suck, the masters of the buttfumble, the team that hasn’t been to the playoffs in 13 years, the team that’s on an eight-game losing streak, the team that Bill Belichick hates with the power of a thousand suns.

Thursday’s joust was the first game between the Pats and Jets without Mr. Bill on the sidelines since 1995. The Hoodie/Golden Bachelor must be laughing his ass off right now. He’s living the dream, appearing on a hundred media platforms, owning half of Nantucket and getting to grin while Bob and Jonathan Kraft try to blame someone else for their unwatchable product.

Really. We expected a tough 2024. We have lived so long and so well. It was always going to be a year of rebuilding and there was no point in getting overly emotional about our football turnaround.

But this? Getting humiliated by Aaron Rodgers and the Jets on national television — New England’s only primetime appearance this season — in Week 3?

Grace!

“None of it was good,” admitted debuting coach Jerod Mayo.

There’s nothing special about the 2024 Jets. They scored just 24 points against the Patriots despite holding a 400-139 total yardage advantage. They committed eight penalties for 106 yards. But no amount of self-sabotage by the Jets can make the Patriots look like an NFL threat in 2024.

Poor Jacoby Brissett. He’s a nine-year veteran with five stamps on his NFL passport (New England, Indianapolis, Miami, Cleveland, Washington). He’s never been a Top Gun and he knows he’s here to show top draftee Drake Maye how to play in the NFL. But he’s been hit 25 times in three games. He threw for just 98 yards against the Jets. Nobody deserves that pinata status.

Trailing 24-3 with 4:24 left, Mayo finally sat Brissett down and called Maye. The kid completed 4 of 8 passes but couldn’t put a point on the board before time ran out. He looked nervous. Who could blame him? What young quarterback would want to start his career behind New England’s horrendous offensive line?

You know it’s bad when WBZ’s Dan Roche, the broken Baghdad Bob of Patriot Nation Media, looks into the camera after a game and says, “I got no sunshine and rainbows on this game. It was just ugly.”

Amen.

▪ Quiz: Name four active NFL quarterbacks who started this season with more than 40,000 passing yards (answer below).

▪ Ultimately, the Red Sox are who we thought they were. They outperformed expectations for much of the season (Alex Cora earned his extension by lifting this team to 11 games above .500), but they collapsed after the All-Star break and will be out of the all-inclusive playoffs for the fifth time in six seasons.

These Bres-Lowball Sox have a chance to finish under .500 for a third straight season, which hasn’t happened since 1959-66, part of the Pinky Higgins era. (The 1994 season was cut short by a strike.) I wonder if any Boston baseball fans bought Jordan’s Furniture thinking it would be free if the Sox won the “world championship”?

▪ How times change department:

Craig Breslow, Red Sox de facto general manager, September 2024: “We’ve been poor clusterers or sequencers of performance.”

Red Sox GM Lou Gorman, March 1987: “The sun will come up, the sun will go down, and I will have lunch.”

▪ The myth of the Red Sox pitching staff was starkly demonstrated as the season progressed. The Sox hurlers excelled from the start — beguiling batters with incredible spin rates (heard enough about the “sweeper”?) — but got worse every month from March/April through August. The bullpen collapsed in historic fashion, posting the worst post-All-Star numbers in team history.

Much of this failure is due to the owners’ insistence on finding cheap help, but part of it is due to what the Red Sox tell their pitchers to do. In August, the Sox’ opponents were in “spin cycle” mode, consistently throwing poorly placed off-speed pitches over the fence.

▪ We heard last week that the Sox are laying off scouts and asking members of the scouting and office staff to take pay cuts. Will this be followed by Sam Kennedy announcing that ticket prices are going up again?

▪ The Royals, who lost 106 games last year, spent nearly $110 million on free agents over the winter and are likely headed to the playoffs. Amazing what can happen when ownership goes full throttle.

▪ The best part of the end of the Red Sox season will be the end (hopefully) of that lame, monstrously imitative crawling signal that Sox players flash into the dugout after a game. each base hit. Almost every team has a stupid ritual like this, and none is more annoying than Boston.

▪ MLB Baserunning 101 in 2024: When you make a mistake on the bases and get thrown out after taking a bad risk, signal to your dugout as soon as the “out” call is made to review the play. The wasted review will make everyone think you actually knew what you were doing. We won’t be fooled.

▪ Mike Yastrzemski led off the Giants’ wins in Baltimore on Tuesday and Wednesday with home runs. That must have been a good feeling. The Orioles organization kept young Yaz in the minors for six long years, never giving him a shot in the bigs.

▪ The WNBA playoffs begin Sunday. The league will add a 15th franchise, which will return to Portland in 2026. ESPN’s WNBA ratings are up 170 percent this season, averaging 1.2 million viewers per game. Thanks, Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese.

▪ The tackle on the concussion-inducing play that changed Tua Tagovailoa’s life was made by Buffalo’s Damar Hamlin. Two seasons ago, the NFL suspended a Monday night game when Hamlin’s heart stopped beating after a collision against the Bengals. Hamlin was revived with CPR and a defibrillator. He spent two days in a medically induced coma.

After Tagovailoa’s hit last week, Hamlin told The Athletic, “It’s trauma. It’s always going to be there. I can’t let it affect me because of the work I’ve done. I’ve done trauma therapy. I have a psychologist that I talk to. It’s allowed me to push my mind forward, push the process forward.”

▪ According to another Athletic story, 57-year-old Troy Aikman takes a cold shower every morning and then goes for a 20-minute walk in the sun to help set his circadian rhythm. The Super Bowl-winning quarterback turned broadcaster says he hasn’t taken a hot shower in years and that he goes to bed by 9 p.m. every night unless he has a game.

▪ WEEI’s Rob Bradford has become the “Retirement Whisperer” for Red Sox players on their last legs. Pitcher James Paxton recently revealed to Bradford that he’s hanging them up at the end of the season. In previous years, Bradford has gotten similar confessions from Rick Porcello, Mitch Moreland and Sean Casey.

▪ The White Sox appear to be on track to surpass the 1962 Mets as the major league team with the most losses in a season since 1900. The Amazons went 40-120, and the ChiSox entered this weekend 36-117 with nine games to play. The defunct Cleveland Spiders went 20-134 in 1899.

▪ Since 2015, the Yankees have gone 5-0 in postseason series against AL Central teams, but are 0-4 against the Astros.

▪ The Dodgers have not ruled out using Shohei Ohtani on the mound in the 2024 playoffs.

▪ The Patriots claim that Jonathan Kraft has nothing to do with their football operation. I find this unlikely, but Jonny Football has certainly disappeared from local media. Kraft’s last season as a weekly Sports Hub pregame guest was in 2016. Kraft did about half of those shows in 2017, but stopped in 2018. He has appeared a few times in recent years, but nothing since October 30, 2022.

▪ Never forget that Bobby Dalbec hit 25 homers and drove in 78 runs in 133 games in 2021 — the Red Sox’ only good season (“Chaim Bloom Magic)” since Dave Dombrowski left. I hope Bobby D finds another home in the big leagues.

▪ Chris Sale is 18-3 with a 2.38 ERA. Because I’m wrong so often, let me resurrect this line from the Globe’s March 20 preseason predictions page: “Chris Sale wins Cy Young Award, Lobel says, ‘Why can’t we get players like that?'”

▪ Go to Start and get $200 if you knew that the Boston College football team won six games in a row against Notre Dame between 2001 and 2008.

▪ On Tuesday, hockey legend Joe Bertagna will be at the State House to announce the 2025 men’s Friendship Four, as well as the teams for the inaugural Women’s Friendship Four (scheduled for January 2026). The field for the 2024 men’s tournament in Belfast over Thanksgiving includes Boston University, Harvard, Notre Dame and Merrimack.

▪ “Sweetwater,” a film about Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton, will premiere Sunday at 7 p.m. at the Boston Film Festival in MIT’s Bartos Theater in the Wiesner Building. Clifton was the first African-American to sign an NBA contract. Chuck Cooper III, the son of the first black player drafted in the NBA (Celtics, 1950), will be on hand for a panel discussion.

▪ In “Locker Room Talk — A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside,” Wellesley graduate and Cambridge resident Melissa Ludtke takes you back to the early days of female sportscasting and her groundbreaking 1978 federal lawsuit against baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn.

▪ RIP Dick Walsh, the legendary Algonquin Regional High School football coach and teacher, who passed away last Saturday at the age of 92.

▪ There are a few quality books available on the Celtics. Chad Finn put together “The Boston Globe’s Story of the Boston Celtics — 1946-Present” (maybe there are a few Bob Ryan captions). When you’re done with that, pick up a copy of Gary Washburn’s “The Boston Celtics: An Illustrated Timeline,” a hardcover, photo-packed book that chronicles the team’s history, including last spring’s 18th Banner run. Washburn will be signing books at WBUR CitySpace on Sept. 30 from 5 to 7 p.m. and at Barnes & Noble in Hingham on Oct. 20 from 1 to 3 p.m.

▪ Answer to the quiz: Aaron Rodgers (Jets), Matthew Stafford (Rams), Joe Flacco (Colts), Russell Wilson (Steelers).

Dan Shaughnessy is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @dan_shaughnessy.