Sports

Gang Green angst minor compared with Bills’

Look, it could be worse. Honestly. Truthfully. Jets fans have a way of magnetizing pain and anguish, of believing all the great sporting misfortunes visit them before heading elsewhere, and it simply is not true.

Look across the aisle. Look at the visitors today, Opening Day at MetLife Stadium. Behold Buffalo’s Bills, playoff-free for a dozen years. Try to remember the last time they actually qualified for a playoff game, and when you do, remember something else: Whenever a game earns a nickname and capital letters, it’s only a good thing for half the participants.

The Immaculate Reception, for instance, makes Raiders fans want to punch a wall.

The Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff was a miracle only for fans of the baseball Giants; for Dodgers fans, it was something more akin to manslaughter of the soul.

So you can imagine that the Music City Miracle, which has inspired more bad poetry in Nashville than anything Conway Twitty ever could have warbled, invokes something else in Bills fans, maybe the only fans on Earth who don’t ever feel the need to scream, for kicks and giggles, “There are no flags on the field!” Buffalo, of course, has become something of a capital for shorthand sporting suffering anyway: Wide Right. No Goal.

But there’s something especially poignant about that one, because it serves as kind of a melancholy bridge between what the Bills have become — essentially a way station for the most forlorn football imaginable over the past 12 years — and what they had been, which is to say the most entertaining football team you ever will see, AFC champs four years running, and the team I would nominate for what’s probably the most dubious honor ever: Best Team to Never Win a Title, Any Sport, Ever.

(Who else is in the conversation, at least across the last 50 years? I round out the Top 5 this way: The Malone/Stockton Jazz. The Ewing Knicks. The Schottenheimer Chiefs. The Tarkenton Vikings.)

So, no. Jets fans don’t have the market cornered on suffering, or angst, or anxiety, or woe, no matter how many times they have had to watch the Giants march up the Canyon of Heroes, no matter how easily they have seen the AFC East trade hands from the Dolphins to the Bills to the Patriots without ever even giving the Jets a courtesy stop-over (seriously, two division titles in 42 years is almost impossible to do).

But this does seem like a different kind of Jets angst.

Probably because this is a different kind of Jets era. Fans of a certain vintage were used to a certain rhythm about the Jets: long stretches of ineptitude interrupted occasionally by flashes of hope. But since Bill Parcells arrived in 1997, that has changed. Both post-merger AFC East titles have come since then. In those 15 years there have been just three losing seasons, and there have been seven playoff berths (after seven in the 37 years that came before) and three trips to the AFC Championship.

The Jets are no longer sad sacks, despite the rep. And Rex Ryan’s arrival has done nothing to diminish that. It’s quite possible we are still very much in the midst of the Jets’ Golden Age. Which probably makes the fact the Giants have won two Super Bowls and appeared in three in that time all the more galling. And maybe explains the angst that still pervades the soul of so many of the tortured true believers.

No, the Jets aren’t the Bills. They have that Super Bowl III trophy. They have had these last 15 years. Whatever heartache games they’ve absorbed, hardly any go by popular nicknames. Does that make you feel any better? It should.

See me again today at 4:30 and tell me if it does.

Whack Back at Vac

Derek Laino: Derek Jeter says he doesn’t panic, but I think it may be time to pull the fire alarm bell with this Yankees team. I may be spoiled, but this is just sickening. Next thing you know, we will see a Tom Glavine clone on the mound getting pounded while the Mets folded like a cheap suit, back in ’07. Phil Hughes or Nova would fit that role like a glove!

Vac: I maintain what I’ve maintained: As long as the Yankees are within three games when the super-soft final 10 games of the season kick off, they’ll be fine.

Jerry Jacobs: Let’s give Chipper Jones a going away present: Fred and Jeff Wilpon.

Vac: Throw in Saul Katz and you’ve got yourself a deal.

@BigBee413: I’m a diehard Red Sox fan and I’m even rooting for Baltimore.

@MikeVacc: Intra-season adoptions are the best, aren’t they?

Nick from Babylon: Wondering if you’ve ever condemned Fernando Rodney’s “arrow” act, or do you only get offended by Yankees pitchers behaving badly?

Vac from Hillsdale: I think any relief pitcher who would test karma by shooting, pointing or pumping is begging for an uhnappy ending, regardless of uniform colors.

Vac’s Whacks

I Guess the Knicks’ uniforms aren’t quite the holy vestments that the Yankees’ are, and altering them won’t make the earth spin backwards on its axis or anything. And, hey, let’s just be happy they didn’t go retro for those Marvin Webster-era, number-above-the-nickname eyesores of yesteryear, right?

* The folks who came up with the idea of old-school, old-style ballparks got it exactly right with Camden Yards, and 20 years later every park that’s come after is in a running battle for second place. And PNC Park in Pittsburgh is the one that’s come closest.

* What’s amazing isn’t the work that baseball neighbors Davey Johnson and Buck Showalter have been doing in Washington and Baltimore this year. What’s amazing are all the years both of them spent between jobs in their careers.

* So at what point does Tom Coughlin respectfully ask everyone to shove him back on the hot seat so his team can respond accordingly?