OAKLAND, Calif. — There was a time, not so long ago, when it was fashionable to pile on the Jets whenever they lost because it’s always fun to gag a gasbag and bottle up a bully. The Jets jabbered constantly and swaggered incessantly and occasionally even hit you in the mouth on the field, too.
And even when they didn’t, even when they lost, even when the performance you saw with your eyes didn’t match the descriptions coming out of their voiceboxes . . . well, you still knew they were in the room. They didn’t stop talking until there were no more games left to play and no one left to listen.
I’m feeling nostalgic for those Jets.
PHOTOS: RAIDERS BEAT JETS, 34-24
Because these Jets not only failed to walk the walk yesterday afternoon in the eardrum-shattering echo of the O.co Coliseum; they’ve also gotten a lot more careful about talking the talk, too. Time was, the Jets didn’t much care what the scoreboard said, even after losses.
Maybe that was hard for some to hear. Maybe that made them hate-able. But you know something you never heard inside a Jets locker room, even after a game like the one they played yesterday, an inexcusable 34-24 stinker that hurts a little now and could hurt a lot more in a few months when the Jets are counting up wins and wondering why they’re packing their bags — either for another playoff road trip or to go home for good?
You never heard this much humility.
“It was embarrassing,” defensive tackle Sione Pouha said yesterday, before upgrading that description to “humiliating.”
“We know we’re better than that,” said Darrelle Revis, his usual brilliant self yesterday even as the rest of the defense morphed into a big, old down pillow. “And we know we have to be better than that.”
“Ridiculous,” Rex Ryan whispered. “It’s my responsibility to fix this.”
ENOUGH.
Sorry. When the Jets talk like this, they sound exactly like any other soundly thumped team, and they sound an awful lot like so many of their spiritual antecedents dating back to 1960. Here’s the dirty little secret about the Ryan-era Jets: They’ve had good talent, not great. Mostly, they’ve played above themselves for two-plus years.
Why is that?
Here’s one man’s vote: because they believed far more in themselves than they really had any reason to. Even in the face of evidence that they were playing a better team, they believed they were the better team. Even at the end of games when it seemed they were completely out of luck, they willed themselves to make their own luck.
It was a clever bit of self-deception. There’s long been a school of thought that the Jets were holding themselves back by talking too much; I see it exactly the opposite. I think their loose lips and chatty nature forced them to play better, in order to own what they were saying.
If it was all the more satisfying for teams to shut them up? It was equally gratifying for the Jets when they backed it up.
Now?
Now the Jets seem far more tentative, on both sides of the ball, than they have since Eric Mangini haunted the sidelines. The Raiders were the team with all the swagger yesterday, Darren McFadden tearing through the Jets defense the way he used to torch the Southeastern Conference back at Arkansas, the defense swarming Jets receivers and making key stops whenever it needed them.
“This stings,” Ryan said. “No question.”
The coach was as down in the mouth as he’s ever been on the job. Even last year, in the moments after the Patriots flattened him in Foxborough in the regular season, there was a defiance lurking behind the praise he heaped on Bill Belichick and the boys. Even after Pittsburgh ended their season, as he walked away from the AFC Championship Game, he said more than once: “I really thought we were gonna get ‘em there at the end.”
And he really believed it, too.
That has been the Jets’ fuel under Ryan, their nourishment. Ryan embodied that. Bart Scott was his first lieutenant; now Scott issues one vanilla quote after another if he clears his throat at all. The locker room has become far more gentlemanly. Maybe that was inevitable.
But it sure was more fun the old way.
More important, the team sure looked a lot better the old way, too.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com