The Jets lost 38-33 to the Raiders on Sunday, but the larger story inside MetLife Stadium was how much of the crowd sounded like it belonged to the visitors. Raiders fans were loud from pregame through the fourth quarter, and at times the home building felt turned inside out.
That mattered because this was not a routine visit. The Raiders had not played the Jets in a non-COVID-19-restricted season since 2019, and the crowd of 70,080 gave the stadium a chance to show who would show up. It also gave the search term now its meaning: people wanted to know whether the noise was real, and it was.
Olu Fashanu lived one of the clearest moments of it. On third-and-5, he committed a false start as Raiders fans made it hard to hear Geno Smith barking out signals. Fashanu did not dress it up afterward. He said, “It’s on me,” and added that he was not going to blame the crowd, even while praising Raiders fans for traveling well. For him, the noise was background, not cover.
That view did not match everyone else. Garrett Wilson said the Raiders had some fans in the building and that the Jets have to handle it. Klint Kubiak went further, saying the silver and black was out and that the fans were loud from pregame all the way to the fourth quarter. Eric Stokes was even waving his arms late to pump the crowd up, while Adonai Mitchell shrugged it off with the reminder that there are only 22 people on the field at the end of the day.
The building changed before halftime, when the Raiders broke through on a 95-yard kickoff return for a touchdown and took a 14-13 lead. Aaron Glenn said that play flipped the crowd, and that was the point when the road-game feel became impossible to ignore. Kirk Cousins called the takeover a pleasant surprise, and said he could hear Raiders fans cheering even when he was on his back after a hit on one of the touchdowns. Braelon Allen said he did not hear the noise at all, which only sharpened the split in how the game sounded to different players on the same field.
That is the part the Jets have to sit with now. They are 2-6, and a crowd that should have been theirs instead became part of the problem, even if not every player heard it the same way. The Raiders may be the NFL’s kind of national team, but on Sunday their fans did more than travel well. They changed the temperature of the game.
