REX RYAN
‘We know we’re good.’
Now that the Jets have sent the carnival barkers packing for the time being and quieted the circus noise, this is their mission tomorrow in Pittsburgh: Validate.
Validate that what they did in that impressive season-opening 48-28 thrashing of the Bills Sunday is who they are.
Validate themselves as the contenders they were in 2009 and 2010, not the pretenders they were in 2011.
The Jets will talk the tough talk about how they don’t have anything to prove to anyone. Coach Rex Ryan was front-and-center with that thought yesterday.
“We know plenty about ourselves already,” he said. “We know we’re a good football team. I think we know enough about ourselves.’’
But the fact is the Jets are as curious as their fans are about whether they’re really as good as they looked against the Bills or if that was merely a special once-in-a-green-moon Sunday.
The Jets can use tomorrow’s game in Pittsburgh, where they have won only one of nine games in their history, to not only get to 2-0 and remain atop the AFC East, but to learn a little more about themselves than they did last week because they’re facing a better opponent in a much more difficult place to play.
After all, do we or the Jets really know if they were that good Sunday or if the Bills that bad?
By about 7:30 tomorrow night, we will have a better handle on the answer to that question.
“Last week was definitely an impression on the league — that the Jets are for real,’’ defensive tackle Marcus Dixon said yesterday. “But we know this week is definitely going to be a true test. So, can we piggyback off that win or are we just going to be satisfied with it? I can tell by the way we’ve been working this week that we’re definitely not satisfied with that win.’’
Dixon called the Jets’ performance against the Bills “very encouraging to us to see what we can do.’’
He added, “That’s why we’re so excited to come out and play a team of Pittsburgh’s caliber so we can show everybody that, ‘Yeah, the Jets are ready this year,’ and that we ain’t your show pony and we ain’t your circus.’’
Yes, the preseason circus talk remains a sharp, annoying pebble in the Jets’ cleats.
“When you call out somebody’s profession and you talk to them like they’re clowns, that’s not funny,’’ Dixon said. “We take what we’re doing around here seriously. Man, we’ve really got a great team here. You saw it last week. The sky’s the limit for the Jets. We know if we play Jets football we can be unstoppable.’’
Across the locker room where veteran right guard Brandon Moore resides, the talk was much more muted and pragmatic, because that’s Moore’s personality. So he wasn’t jumping out of his slacks at the way the Jets played last week, ready to proclaim them as an AFC power. He was, however, very encouraged by what he witnessed.
“Every week, you’re trying to prove yourself all over again,’’ Moore said. “That’s the nature of this business. Once you start thinking you’re pretty good and you’ve got everything figured out that’s when you get beat.’’
Moore then offered this perspective that only a veteran locker-room leader can: “If we stink it up [tomorrow] nobody’s going to be talking about how good we looked against Buffalo, they’ll be talking about how badly we stunk in Pittsburgh.
“If we win we’re 2-0 going into the next one and we would know we beat a great team and we’d take that to Miami [for the next game],’’ Moore added.
“Is there a tendency to wonder, ‘Are we really that good?’ ’’ defensive tackle Sione Po’uha said. “We’ve always known that we have a good team. That might not have been the perception outside the box, but inside the box it’s always been that way. Maybe from an outside perception, you can kind of look at this game like we have to validate what we did last week, but I think every week is a validation for us.’’