Cast of Misfits: The New York Jets

If you haven't heard, Alfonzo Dennard, a cornerback for the New England Patriots, was found guilty today of assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest. He faces up to six years in prison. Yesterday, Da'Quan Bowers, a defensive end for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, was arrested for possessing a loaded gun at LaGuardia Airport. Both are felonies.

The reason I bring this up is that it is a corollary to the widespread concept that the New York Jets are perpetually a circus. For a variety of reasons that I won't bring up here, it's true, but it's widely perpetuated and exaggerated by the media begging for a story (which I wrote about here).

I'm not going to try and argue that the players on the Jets don't do foolish things off the field, including anonymous sources, media bans, calling other players expletives, etc., however one of interesting way of determining if a team is filled with thugs, lowlifes, or criminals, is by measuring how many arrests they have. For example: The Cincinnati Bengals are continually cited as a team that loves to bring in criminals for players. The Bengals have had 39 arrests among their players since 2000. Source.

By comparison, the Jets have had only nine arrests since 2000, two of which were during the Rex Ryan Era. The always classy Patriots? Fourteen. Our cross-town rivals, the New York Giants? Twelve. In fact, out of all NFL arrests since 2000, the Jets comprise only 1.4% of them. The Jets have the second lowest arrest record in the NFL, one more than the St. Louis Rams, and tied with the Arizona Cardinals and the Houston Texans.

My point is this: The next time a member of the media or a drinking buddy says the Jets are filled with hooligans or criminals, point them to that statistic.