THE first two times they had the ball yesterday, the Jets went through the Lions for 81 and 80 yards like they weren’t there, just like about 10,000 persons weren’t there, not bothering to use their tickets. With the win total already at four, as many games as the Jets won in 2005 and were generally expected to win in 2006, apparently only Fireman Ed has taken the time to study the schedule.
The combined record of the remaining nine opponents, which include contests with the 5-1 Patriots and 6-0 Bears, is 24-32. Meaning, if the Jets, who have reached to 4-3 by beating teams with a combined record of 19-26, don’t win nine games, they will be seriously screwing up. They could even stumble once against somebody not as good as they are, an NFL inevitability, and still get to 10.
We mean 10 wins now, not 10 Jets sacks for the season or 10 tackles by Dewayne Robertson in his career or 10 interesting statements made by Eric Mangini in his entire life. We’re talking actual triumphs here, ones that could have the Jets competing for a playoff spot in Weeks 16 and 17.
We will get our head examined only after you examine a remaining slate with 1-5 Cleveland, 1-5 Oakland, 2-4 Houston, 1-6 Miami, 2-4 Green Bay and 2-5 Buffalo. There’s more puff in there than in a typical Woody Johnson statement, not even requiring a Jets win at 4-2 Minnesota to get to double digits.
“It was about this time last year that we started dropping like flies,” said Pete Kendall, trying to be the voice of reason, not the prophet of doom. But it’s been many seasons since this many teams looked so utterly doomed before the halfway point, so the Jets need to profit.
Yesterday, a New York ground game made up of heretofore groundless accusations, ran for 221 yards and 16 first downs against the league’s last-rated defense against the run, minus its best run stopper, Shawn Rogers. This early, one must place such accomplishments in proper context. Later, when Eric Mangini is Coach of the Year, Chad Pennington the Comeback Player of the Year, and Leon Washington, after running for more yards than Reggie Bush, is the Rookie of the Year; these Jets will be Somebody, never mind they played Nobody.
Turnovers and schedules make all things possible, except probably for the Lions, who kept coming back to within a score of the Jets yesterday despite no hope of their defense actually getting a stop when they needed one. Chad Pennington, who lofted a 44-yard scoring beauty to Justin McCareins over Dre Bly, was finding Jericho Cotchery at will against a Lions secondary coached by coordinator Donnie Henderson – looking a lot like the secondary he coached last year with the Jets.
It also looked like this year’s Jet secondary, which keyed on Roy Williams (only two catches) to a point where Mike Furrey was making nine receptions to build Jon Kitna’s 269 passing yards.
The Jets still suffer the absence of a pass rush or a big-time cover corner. Rome wasn’t built in a day, unless maybe it can be with a schedule like this. If the NFL wanted to build one for the Jets, they will go to the playoffs should Pittsburgh and Jacksonville continue to underachieve.
Coach won’t let us look at it that way,” said Chad Pennington. “And our guys won’t look at it that way.”
The quarterback’s nose stretched so far on that one, he’ll be offsides on his first play Sunday in Cleveland, where the Jets will play another team they should beat. They know exactly what to say about taking them one at a time. They are also playing too smart to fail to recognize opportunity when they see it.
RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo
HTML:
3.2
| Encoding:
UTF-8
| Version:
0.7.4