FLORHAM PARK, N.J. — The most impressive run of Zach Wilson’s NFL career came last year in a game that didn’t even matter. It was a sight to behold, watching him dodge a sea of Jaguars pass rushers to get out of the pocket, tiptoe the sideline, juke another defender and then dive into the end zone at the end of a thrilling 52-yard touchdown run. Wilson celebrated with his teammates. Fans at MetLife Stadium cheered.

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“I just remember being tired,” Wilson said this week, smiling.

That day, Wilson bested Trevor Lawrence, beating his draft-day compatriot despite throwing for only 102 yards in a 26-21 win. But in that moment on Dec. 26, when Wilson scored, nobody cared that the Jets were 3-11, just that they had a quarterback capable of such a moment. Like Andy Bernard, the Jets must wish “there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.”

Lawrence and Wilson will face off again Thursday night, a different world. On Sunday, fans booed Wilson, in his first start after being benched for three weeks, only returning because the man who replaced him (Mike White) suffered fractured ribs. The Jets lost to the Lions, dropping to 7-7, their hopes for the playoffs hanging by a thread. Meanwhile, Lawrence is ascending, becoming the next big thing he was hyped as coming out of Clemson, as the Jaguars make their own late-season playoff push.

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The Jaguars (6-8) have their guy, as the Jets try to figure out if Wilson can be theirs. In an alternate universe, the Jets don’t win two meaningless late-season games in 2020 to push them down a spot in the draft order, and away from Lawrence. Now the Jets are playing meaningful games in December, and losing them.

Thursday night, Wilson will battle Lawrence again, two quarterbacks from the same draft class, on wildly different paths.

“I’m not playing against Zach, I’m playing against the Jets defense,” Lawrence told reporters this week. “It’s annoying when people always compare.”

Jets coach Robert Saleh said something similar.

“You never want to compare,” Saleh said. “Everyone’s situation is different. The styles and system might be different. How they got to where they are is different, so to me, it’s not fair to compare.”

And yet, it’s hard not to.

Saleh is a dreamer. He desires an NFL world with something unobtainable: time. Often, Saleh has decried the “instant coffee” nature of modern society, where young players — especially quarterbacks — aren’t given a chance to truly develop before being cast aside. He longs for the old days. Aaron Rodgers didn’t start his first game until his fourth year. Patrick Mahomes famously sat behind Alex Smith for a year.

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“The quarterback position, it takes time,” Saleh said. “There’s quarterbacks through the history of time that needed just a little bit longer to find their groove. So, when you see Zach, he’s got a lot of things that you just can’t teach. You just can’t teach some of the stuff that he does. For him, it’s learning the timing and rhythm aspect of it and the intermediate pass game and finding all that consistency for four quarters, because when he is in rhythm and he is hitting on all cylinders, it’s pretty cool to watch.

“Again, the balance is you’re always trying to win football games first, and you hope the development is happening all at the same time, but at the same time, the object of the game is to win.”

That wasn’t as much of a goal in 2021, the first year of the latest Jets rebuild with a new coaching staff, led by Saleh. When Wilson was drafted, the Jets didn’t even have a veteran quarterback on the roster, and didn’t add one of consequence until midseason. So Wilson was gifted the starting job right away, skipping the facade of a competition — an approach Saleh changed this year when he made rookie cornerback Sauce Gardner compete for a starting job in training camp.

“You could always play the hindsight game,” Saleh said. “You can draw up the perfect picture and say: Could we have done more for him? Absolutely … but that’s a tough one.”

It becomes harder to preach patience as quarterbacks like Lawrence and Justin Fields, drafted 11th last year, sail past Wilson in their progression — and especially as the Jets’ timeline was sped up this season by a playoff push. Wilson became a victim of the Jets’ success, in need of development, on a team that couldn’t afford to watch him work through his growing pains, especially in front of a fan base thirsty for a return to the playoffs.

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Lawrence had a bad rookie season (12 touchdowns, league-high 17 interceptions), and started this year off slow too, completing just 62 percent of his passes with 10 touchdowns and six interceptions through Week 8. But he plays in Jacksonville, where negative noise is faint, like a whisper, compared to the external pressure Wilson is experiencing.

“Coming here to New York, you hear about the media and the fan base,” Wilson said. “It’s just a lot of passionate people out here.”

Saleh’s dream of an NFL world with patience isn’t realistic in the social media age.

“When I got in the league, social media wasn’t as big of a thing,” said 37-year-old Jets left tackle Duane Brown, drafted in 2008. “There weren’t so many loud voices and opinions about everybody. It was very selective on who you heard critique players and there was always somebody there for a young guy to learn from. Now, guys get drafted and they gotta be the guy. The microscope is just so crazy for players these days. The voices and chatter that comes from all angles about their play, good or bad, I try to tell people as much as possible to try to block it out. But that’s easier said than done.”

It reached a boiling point for Wilson in Week 11, an ugly 10-3 loss to the Patriots in which he threw for 77 yards and the Jets offense managed just 2 yards of offense in the second half. In his postgame news conference, Wilson angrily declined to take responsibility for his struggles, a moment that went viral on social media and perturbed some in the Jets’ locker room. He was benched for White a few days later in a move that Saleh labeled a “reset,” to get him back to basics. He was bumped all the way down to third-string and inactive on game day; from No. 2 pick to scout team quarterback after 20 starts.

In those three weeks, Wilson tried to find the “fun” in football again, he said. He sought out advice from NFL legends who had rough patches in their careers too. He called Drew Brees, whom the Chargers cast aside for Philip Rivers. He called Steve Young, whom the Buccaneers dumped after two years; he sat behind Joe Montana for another four. And he called Kurt Warner, who didn’t become a starting quarterback until he was 28.

“The biggest thing was there’s going to be these ups and downs in football and you always have to believe in yourself,” Wilson said. “Some of the biggest things I took from it was: Where you want to get, this is just going to help you get there faster — the bumps, the ups and downs. It’s tough, but eventually you’re able to make your way through it.”

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His teammates have noticed a brighter disposition, even if all of Wilson’s fundamental issues — namely, footwork — are still a work in progress. Linebacker C.J. Mosley noted an improvement in Wilson’s “confidence.”

“That’s a testament to him, and the people around him,” Mosley said, because after Wilson got benched, “it could’ve been a lot worse than it was.”

The tone is different down in Jacksonville.

The Jaguars have won four of six games, making a late charge for the postseason, and Lawrence is the biggest reason why: He’s thrown 14 touchdowns and one interception, and run for one more touchdown, since Week 9. The Jets have scored 10 touchdowns total in that same stretch. And Wilson has thrown only 15 touchdowns … in 21 career games.

Since Week 9, Lawrence has the second-best completion percentage (70.4), best QB rating (111.2), fourth-best EPA per dropback (0.29) and his time to throw (2.34 seconds) is the fastest of any quarterback. He threw for 318 yards and four touchdowns in a win over the 10-4 Cowboys, the third-best defense by Football Outsiders’ DVOA metric. He threw for 368 yards and three touchdowns — and added a rushing touchdown — against the AFC South-leading Titans, ranked 16th in DVOA. And he threw for 321 yards and three touchdowns against the Ravens, ranked eighth in DVOA.

Jaguars coach Doug Pederson pointed to an interception Lawrence threw in a loss to the Broncos in London on Oct. 30 as a turning point.

“You go back and look at the beginning of the season and we were careless with the football,” Pederson said on “The Rich Eisen Show” last week. “This is where his growth has come. I think that interception he threw on the goal line in London was a bit of a wake-up call, a bell that rung in his head that I have to do a better job of protecting the football. That was a play that he would like to have back and put him on a trajectory that he’s on now. Sometimes it takes a moment like that for young players to understand how to play this game. Since then, he’s done a great job of taking care of the ball.”

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Wilson has not taken care of the football. He has a turnover-worthy play rate of 5.6 percent, per PFF, which is second-worst among quarterbacks with at least 100 pass attempts. When Wilson has started, the Jets have run a simplified offense emphasizing the running game, hoping to prevent him from making back-breaking mistakes. It worked in wins over the Bills, Packers and Broncos this season, but failed against the Patriots, and it was a bumpy road against the Lions too. Wilson is still unquestionably capable of eye-catching moments, like his 40-yard touchdown pass to C.J. Uzomah last week. But those moments haven’t made up for his mistakes most weeks.

“When you watch him, he can make all the throws,” Jaguars defensive coordinator Mike Caldwell told reporters this week. “He’s a guy that throws from different angles. He can throw a heck of an out ball. He’s a guy that you see the talent there, you see why he was drafted so high, and he just makes plays for them.”

“He’s a guy that has the opportunity to make plays and he goes for it,” Caldwell added. “The good ones throw guys open in this league. If you wait for a guy to get open, it’s either going to get picked or you’re going to get sacked. He trusts his arm, which he should because he can sling it, and he goes out there to make plays.”

.@ZachWilson throws across the field to @cj_uzomah for a 40-yard @nyjets TD!

📺: #DETvsNYJ on CBS
📱: Stream on NFL+ https://t.co/nW0d7KOLXR pic.twitter.com/g0WQF9v7kb

— NFL (@NFL) December 18, 2022

But Wilson’s issue has never been those off-schedule plays. Few quarterbacks have been worse this season throwing to the intermediate area of the field. Per TruMedia, Wilson completes 50.9 percent of passes between 5 and 20 yards, which ranks 36th of 40 quarterbacks with at least 100 pass attempts. Lawrence (63.6 percent) is 14th.

Wilson’s struggles against pressure are well-documented too: He’s ranked last of 69 quarterbacks graded by Pro Football Focus this season, completing 30.7 percent of his passes when pressured. Lawrence isn’t exactly Tom Brady in that area — 49.2 percent — but PFF ranks him 13th against pressure since Week 9.

These are quarterbacks operating on two different planes of NFL existence — and it’s not as if Lawrence has been in a particularly stable situation, either. He survived the Urban Meyer debacle as a rookie, and most would argue the Jets have provided Wilson with a better supporting cast than Lawrence has in Jacksonville. Lawrence’s targets have dropped 30 of his passes, the second-most in the NFL, per TruMedia. Wilson has experienced only seven drops. The Jets defense is ranked sixth in DVOA, the Jaguars are 28th.

Maybe Saleh is right, that Wilson shouldn’t be compared against Lawrence. After all, they don’t have much in common.

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“We actually use the same chef,” Lawrence said.

But they’re cooking different meals.

(Top photo: Al Bello / Getty Images)

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