Oh, the Jets had you this time, didn’t they? They had you believing. They had you crowing. They had you swaggering, defiantly declaring that the Same Old Jets were dead, steadfastly believing that all the garbage accumulated across 40 empty years had officially been tagged, bagged, and dragged to a compactor.
It seems like an eon ago, but it was a week ago. A week ago this morning, the Jets awoke at 9-2 and sharing the top spot of the entire AFC with the Patriots, and if you root for the team in green, you awoke feeling equally giddy, equally optimistic.
Yes, that was only a week ago.
“Long week,” Dustin Keller whispered. “A very long week.”
In the interim, the Jets were humbled by the Patriots, an egregious, embarrassing loss that officially re-defined the hammer-and-nail relationship between the Pats and the Jets, and even that couldn’t appropriately serve as a buffer for what you got yesterday, the Same Old Jets infecting the Brand New Meadowlands with a woeful 10-6 loss to the Dolphins, the kind of hard-to-explain, late-season home loss that has become as big a part of the calendar as Flag Day.
“It makes me sick,” Mark Sanchez, the quarterback, said.
You can tell him all about the nausea involved in watching these Decembers, can’t you? Even before the deluge, there were a lot of Jets fans trying hard not to think of 1986 and 2008, two other seasons that began with such promise (10-1 and 8-3) and ended with such despair (five straight losses to close out 1986 and four of the last five in 2008).
The Jets tried to put all of that negative energy in a different room even after the Patriots loss, starting with a head coach who decided the day after 45-3 was the perfect time to include his Jets in the same sentence as the 1985 Bears. Yet now, even the players are starting to sound like Hank from Hicksville and Larry from Levittown and Frankie from Florham Park.
“We can get this turned around,” Keller said. “We still have three more games and then the playoffs. God willing.”
God willing? Fifteen minutes ago the Jets were talking about playoff byes and hosting home games, and now they invoke the Almighty as they try to stave off what would be among the grandest gag jobs in their illustrious history of indigestion?
“All I know,” Jerricho Cotchery said, “is we got to get this fixed fast.”
You wonder if that’s really possible now, or even feasible. This, after all, was a team that not only lost to a quarterback, Chad Henne, who threw for all of 55 yards yesterday (55, to go with Henne’s robust 58.3 quarterback rating). This was a team that lost whatever veneer it had been carrying of being some kind of people’s choice with one ugly incident in the third quarter.
Even the man who has been this team’s best, most reliable and certainly much clutch player, Santonio Holmes, suffered a critical brain cramp, dropping a wide-open touchdown toss from Sanchez in the second quarter. The Jets settled for a field goal. Those four points happened to be the final margin of defeat, and if you are a Jets fan of any vintage, you knew that was going to be the case the moment the ball hit the ground.
The defense did rebound from Monday’s abysmal no-show in Foxborough, limiting the Dolphins to six first downs (only one after halftime), which should’ve been enough for even the Jets’ impotent offense. And wasn’t.
And maybe that was a just piece of karma, if you think about it.
During a third-quarter punt return, Miami’s Nolan Carroll was dashing downfield, and wandered a few steps out of bounds, where a Jets staffer wearing a green warm-up suit — later confirmed as strength and conditioning coach Sal Alosi — stuck out his knee, a maneuver that was careless at best, reckless at worst, and makes SpyGate seem like harmless gamesmanship by comparison.
“We’ve got to find a way to get into the playoffs now,” Rex Ryan said, this from a man whose championship-or-bust mantra has been unwavering since the middle of July.
Yes. It’s official. Even the Jets don’t buy their own baloney anymore.
Do you?