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Win and they’re in.
This is the delicious scenario the Jets’ upset win over the Steelers on Sunday in Pittsburgh put them in this week as they prepare to play the Bears on Sunday in Chicago.
A win over the Bears, who earned the NFC North title with a win over the Vikings last night in Minneapolis, will clinch a wild-card playoff berth for the 10-4 Jets, allowing them to not face playing the division-rival Bills on the last game of the regular season needing a win to get in.
Last season, the Jets needed a succession of miracles and a bizarre confluence of events to unfold in the final weeks of the regular season to set themselves up with a win-and-they’re-in scenario in the regular-season finale against the Bengals.
This year, they’d like to avoid that stress.
“The great thing is all we’ve got to do is win,” Rex Ryan said yesterday. “That’s all I’m concerned with right now — trying to get a win any way, any how.”
“Any time you can go ahead and put yourselves in a situation where you have a playoff berth instead of having to go into that last game needing to win, that would be big for us,” linebacker Calvin Pace said. “We need to handle our business this week, go into another tough environment, don’t worry about all implications, have fun and not be too uptight.
“[Sunday] was a great step for us and getting this one [against the Bears] would be an even bigger step for us.”
Pace called the win in Pittsburgh “as big a win as you can get, with a playoff-like environment.”
Defensive end Shaun Ellis, the longest-tenured Jet, said clinching a playoff berth before the final game of the season “would mean a lot for us, because we don’t want to wait for the last game.
“[The win over the Steelers] definitely does a lot for our confidence,” Ellis said. “This is a momentum-booster considering the last two weeks of letdowns we had.”
The Jets went into Pittsburgh reeling from their 45-3 loss to the Patriots in New England and their 10-6 home loss to the Dolphins.
“For whatever reason we doubted ourselves after losing those two games,” Pace said. “We had to go back to the drawing board and look at ourselves in the mirror and we had to get back on a roll.”
Fullback Tony Richardson said doubting themselves was “human nature when you have a couple of bad games.
“Monday night in New England, that was pretty devastating,” he said. “Then against Miami our offense didn’t hold up our end of the bargain.”
Said right tackle Wayne Hunter: “Maybe this win (over the Steelers) gets a new snowball rolling for us.”
Maybe it’s best the Jets appear headed for the playoffs as a wild-card entrant, because that means they’ll be on the road for as long as they stay alive in the postseason.
The Jets, who’ve struggled at home, are 6-1 on the road this season.
So they should feel right at home Sunday in Chicago.
“For whatever reason we play good on the road, so going to Chicago this week and playing on the road in the playoffs is a positive,” Pace said. “If you can win in a place like Pittsburgh you can win anywhere.”
Left tackle D’Brickashaw Ferguson agreed that the win over the Steelers could help galvanize another deep run into the playoffs like last season.
“That Pittsburgh game was a great atmosphere, it was everything that a big game needed to be, and the fact that we were successful speaks volumes for us that we can rise to the occasion,” Ferguson said.
“We played like Jets,” Ryan said. “We played like the team I think we are — a team that is physical, prideful, has a lot of talent and a team that expects to go out and win. That’s exactly how we know how to play and we know what we have to do.”