PARSIPPANY, NJ — At 9:47 a.m. Sunday, exactly 13 minutes before the New York Jets’ season opener, 47-year-old Mark Devlin began rotating his recliner four degrees clockwise — Step One of a 14-step pregame ritual that has, across 11 NFL seasons, produced a combined record of 47-129.
The ritual, which Devlin refers to internally as ‘The Sequence’ and to his wife as ‘shut up I’m doing the thing,’ includes putting his Brett Favre jersey on inside-out, eating exactly six baby carrots, texting his brother the word ‘ascend,’ and refusing to make eye contact with the family dog until after the coin toss.
‘He thinks the dog is a bad omen because we got her in 2020, which was the Adam Gase year,’ said Lisa Devlin, who has been quietly documenting the ritual since 2014 in a spiral notebook her husband does not know about. ‘The carrots have to be from a bag opened that morning. Last September I tried to use leftover carrots and he made me drive to ShopRite at 9:12.’
According to Devlin, the ritual was developed organically after the Jets’ 2014 home opener, in which he happened to be wearing complimentary socks from a Marriott in Hartford. The team won. He has worn Marriott socks for every home opener since. The Jets are 2-9 in those games.
Step 11, sources confirm, requires Devlin to recite the entire 1998 Jets starting lineup from memory while holding a TV remote ‘like a microphone, but not in a way that’s weird.’ Step 12 involves opening and closing the refrigerator three times. Step 13 is ‘a thing he does with his hands that he won’t let anyone film.’ Step 14 is kickoff.
Dr. Henrik Vance, a behavioral psychologist at the Atlantic Heartland Project who studies what he calls ‘magical sports thinking,’ noted that fan rituals tend to expand and never contract. ‘A fan adds a step every time the team wins. They never remove a step when the team loses. Over a decade, you end up with a grown man who, before each game, is essentially performing a small one-act play in his living room for an audience of zero, plus a confused goldendoodle.’
Devlin remains undeterred. The Jets went 5-12 last season, a year in which he added Step 9 (humming the first eight bars of ‘Eye of the Tiger’ while opening the carrot bag) midway through October. He attributes the team’s 2-3 finish over the final five games to the addition, and not, as his brother-in-law has suggested, to garbage-time stat padding against backups.
‘You can’t argue with results,’ Devlin said, in reference to a 17-year run with no playoff wins.
As of press time, Devlin had already begun drafting modifications for Week 2, including a 15th step involving a specific kitchen chair he is no longer allowed to sit in for non-football reasons, and was telling his 9-year-old nephew Caleb that this — this — is the year.