Can Jets make AFC title game? Fan’s scarily accurate coin flip test says yes
Andrew Walker
There is a 1994 quarter sitting on the table next to Alex Noon’s bed, and he talks about it like it’s a living entity, with a mind of its own.
The coin.
“The thing that sucks,” Noon said, “is the coin says the Jets are going to lose to the Patriots and Bears the next two weeks.”
Noon, from Long Island, is a diehard Jets fan, so he’s conflicted, but he would never doubt the coin. It sat there when he woke up at 6:30 a.m. a few weeks ago to check the results of his bar exam, and he passed. And the coin is the reason why Noon went viral after the Jets upset the Bills at MetLife Stadium on Sunday.
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In August, Noon, 24, was texting with his Jets fan friends — their group chat is labeled “Jet Up” — and they began to discuss the story of a Raiders fan who flipped a coin to predict that team’s results in 2021. That fan’s coin was accurate for the first 11 Raiders games.
So Noon decided he’d do the same for the Jets before this season. The rules were simple: One flip for each game, heads counts as a win, tails counts as a loss. He thought about making it the opposite — tails never fails, after all — but changed his mind after remembering that Bills quarterback Josh Allen failed calling tails in overtime of last season’s AFC Championship Game.
Noon was confident that the Jets would be better this season, but he still figured they’d finish below .500. When the coin had the Jets going 3-2 in their first five games, with wins over the Browns, Steelers and Dolphins, that seemed realistic. Two wins in a row, on the road, against the Packers and Broncos?
Less likely.
A win against the Bills, the Super Bowl favorite, in Week 9? No chance.
Then the Jets beat the Packers 27-10 in Green Bay, and the Broncos 16-9 in Denver. They lost to the Patriots in Week 8, as the coin predicted, and then did the unthinkable against Buffalo.
The coin predicts the Jets finishing 11-6 and making it all the way to the AFC Championship Game.
Just did a coin flip to predict the Jets season and this is what happened 👀 @NYJ_Matt @NyjMike
— Nooner (@noonernation) August 21, 2022
“I actually thought when I flipped it there’s no way this is all going to happen,” Noon said. “I just happened to predict them having an insane season and I figured I just gotta tweet it out and post it. From there, slowly but surely, it picked up. After they upset the Bills on Sunday it just absolutely exploded.”
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After the win, Fox Sports’ NFL Twitter account, with nearly three million followers, tweeted out Noon’s sheet of paper, with the coin’s predictions. When the game ended, his phone wouldn’t stop vibrating. Tuesday, the official NFL account tweeted about Noon to its 31 million followers. He was also mentioned on “Good Morning Football” on NFL Network.
“I got hit up by people I haven’t spoken to in years,” Noon said.
One person he hadn’t spoken to since high school Venmo’d him $5 for the “coin fund.” Another former high school friend tried to FaceTime him “like six times in a row.” He had to call him to tell him to stop.
“There were more important people in my life I wanted to talk to at that point,” Noon said, laughing. “My girlfriend, her family, my best friends from college. It was crazy. The amount of people that texted me: ‘I bet on the Jets today because of you’ … it was really just something else. I had to go take a walk around my block for like 10 minutes and not look at my phone.”
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What happens next is … complicated for Noon. He’s been a Jets fan since he was a kid, running around the house in a Chad Pennington jersey. His uncle hasn’t missed a home game since 2000, and his father made sure he rooted for the Jets. “Just one of those things that’s always been with me,” he said. He hasn’t been to a game yet this year, but plans to go sometime in December.
But he’s worried about the coin. It has the Jets losing to the Patriots on the road after the bye week, and to the Bears at home in Week 12. After that it’s a five-game winning streak, a loss to the Dolphins in Week 18 and two wins in the playoffs.
“I want to get excited about” the coin, Noon said. “I’m in such a weird spot right now because I’m a huge Jets fan and I want them to win every game. And at the same time it’s something I’m going to try and monetize what I can off of it because it’s gotten this far, this is crazy enough.”
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He’s working with a T-shirt distributor to sell some shirts featuring a 1994 quarter. Instead of “In God We Trust,” the coin will say “In Rob We Trust” for Jets coach Robert Saleh.
Monday, Saleh said: “Even the most optimistic Jets fan wouldn’t have had us at 6-3.”
Well, the coin did.
(Photo of Alex Noon, kneeling, with friends at MetLife Stadium: Courtesy of Noon)