Zach Wilson looks done with Jets after latest disaster

The problem is the quarterback, sure. Zach Wilson seems to regress with every snap. He seems to shrink with every game. He plays with all the confidence of a poker player who’s just gone all-in on pocket 2-9. Unsuited. A quarterback playing this terrible is a problem.

But the potential calamity is even greater.

Because the Jets have to understand, have to realize, that there is a very real possibility that they had the No. 3 and No. 2 picks in the draft within three years of each other — earned, on merit, thanks to some of the most atrocious football in a franchise history that isn’t exactly unfamiliar with atrocious football — and twice took quarterbacks.

And they got it wrong — abjectly wrong — both times.

This isn’t just a devastating possibility; it’s the kind of thing that can be decimating to an entire organization. And a rapidly escalating and sobering truth is that this isn’t just a possibility, but a probability. Zach Wilson doesn’t just look overmatched.

He looks over.

It’s that bad.

“It starts with me,” Wilson said after the Jets’ thoroughly deplorable 19-3 loss to the Jaguars before 70,043 salty and sopping fans at MetLife Stadium. “I have to be better.”

Wilson has gotten better at shouldering the burdens of his failures, which makes sense because he keeps getting so many opportunities to do that. Gone are the who, me? veneer and the smug sneer that got him benched even faster than his performance did.

In its place is a sad, struggling kid who on Thursday probably looked across the field at Trevor Lawrence — picked one skinny slot ahead of him in the 2021 draft — and had to probably marvel to himself: “We actually play the same position?

You know that’s what the fans were muttering the whole drive home.

“When people are confident,” Jets coach Robert Saleh said, “they can conquer the world.”

Saleh is in an impossible situation. He is a coach with defensive roots, and you have to believe that, when he watches Zach Wilson’s glazed look in the pocket and his chronic indecision, he wonders just how easy it would be to set a defense loose after him. Because Wilson has now reached a level beyond ineffectiveness, and it is an even more unacceptable place.

He is now noncompetitive.

You can’t have that in the NFL on a special teams gunner or a long snapper, let alone an alleged franchise quarterback. It was a strange and temporarily delightful thing to see Chris Streveler — QB4 on the depth chart, for those keeping score — coax the Jets down the field with his legs, with his moxie.

He competed.

That’s a low bar, sure. But even that seems to be out of Wilson’s reach, out of his range. And on this night, he couldn’t keep a fourth-stringer off the field — and the booing at MetLife would’ve gotten even louder if Saleh had tried to. What does that tell you?

“We haven’t seen the last of him,” Saleh insisted.

And that’s where the calamity part comes into the picture. It was clear, even during Wilson’s sabbatical a few weeks ago — when Mike White re-emerged as a folk hero before having his ribs reduced to lentil soup in Buffalo — that Saleh was reluctant to commit to his backup. Understand: Saleh is — and has to be — about winning football games. His career depends on it. Based on that, what he said never matched up with what he had to see because everyone else — even those of us with untrained eyes — saw it.

And you realize: The Jets, as an operation, so desperately need Wilson to succeed. They understand the optics of whiffing so glaringly twice in four years. Joe Douglas has made a lot of smart moves rebuilding the Jets, but if Wilson is truly as bad as he looks right now — and how do you argue differently? — that one decision alone could destroy his tenure here.

That’s how bad Wilson has been. Was he the only reason the Jets looked so inept and impotent against the Jags? Of course not. This was a night of team-wide sloth and a team-wide stupor in the face of a must-win game. Everyone has to answer for it.

But that doesn’t excuse what we saw, what we’ve seen, what we’re starting to understand might be the hard, harsh truth. The Jets really did whiff twice in four years. Sam Darnold was merely a warm-up for Zach Wilson. It would be a bitter pill to swallow, but the men who run the Jets should prepare to choke it down. The kid isn’t just overmatched, sad to say.

He looks over.