Two and a half weeks ago, the Jets season’ appeared ready to spiral out of control.
The Jets had just been “Tebowed” by the Broncos, losing their second straight game and dropping to 5-5 with their playoff hopes slipping away. Adversity was nothing new to this group, who endured a three-game losing streak and sniping in the locker room earlier this year, but a feeling of desperation pervaded practices and meeting rooms.
“I think there was a point after the Denver game where it did seem like the panic button had been pressed a little bit,” guard Matt Slauson said in a conference call yesterday. “There were a couple of days there, and also our three-game losing stretch in the beginning of the season, where things didn’t go the way we expected them to go. So, I think we were all kind of caught off-guard at both of those points.”
The Jets have silenced the panic by winning two straight games with fourth-quarter comebacks, showing just how resilient this team can be. They now sit at 7-5 with the playoffs still not a certainty, but a very real possibility.
After their dramatic wins over the Bills and Redskins, the Jets hope Tim Tebow’s 95-yard march on Nov. 17 was not only the low point of their season, but also the turning point.
“The fact is you’ve lost two games in a row and you just got beat by a team that you really were playing well against the whole game,” Jets coach Rex Ryan said in a conference call. “And the way we got beat, obviously, [it was] like, ‘Oh, great.’ But, again, this team has plenty of confidence. We don’t lack for confidence. Not one bit. We think we can beat any team in this league. Obviously, we’ve lost five games this year, so that’s not always a fact, but we believe, going into every single game, that we’re going to win.”
The loss to the Broncos was the second time this season the Jets appeared ready to crumble. When they lost three straight in late September and early October it led to players — most notably Santonio Holmes and Brandon Moore — pointing fingers at each other. Suddenly, a preseason Super Bowl contender looked like it might be finished before Halloween.
Ryan told the team to knock it off and to have each other’s backs. They went out and beat the Dolphins on the following Monday to begin a three-game winning streak. There have been no signs of division amongst the players since.
“I think that’s the thing — stay positive,” cornerback Darrelle Revis said after Sunday’s win. “Let’s not get into the negativity of calling guys out or pointing people out I think we’re past that and moving forward.”
The next crisis arrived in November after back-to-back losses to the Patriots and Broncos. Ryan has never looked more emotional than after the loss in Denver, when the Jets defense controlled the game for 55 minutes but could not finish.
“The feeling after the Denver game was even a lot more intense than [the three-game losing skid] because we knew that we shouldn’t have lost to Denver,” Slauson said. “We definitely have the ability and the game plan to do it but it was just poor team execution. We felt like that loss in particular was kind of on us as players. We just didn’t really show up. It also put us in a position where it made it a lot more difficult for the postseason. Kind of the reaction around the team was really down and it was really difficult to put that behind us. Since then, we’ve been doing OK and bouncing back.”
Those crises are now memories. The Jets hope that in a few weeks they can look back at them when they’re recounting their road to the playoffs.
“We’re a team that just wants to win and get in the playoffs and see what happens,” Ryan said. “That’s what we try to do. Our goal’s intact even thought it looked really bad a few weeks. … It was a devastating loss we had to Denver but again, we can’t focus on that. We’ve got to focus on improvement and finding ways to win games. We don’t have any wiggle room. We’ve got to get it done and we understand that.”