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The Jets have spent the better part of two years defiantly staring down history, aggressively putting distance between themselves and the string of banana peels that have gotten in their way through the decades.
In fact, one of the good things you might identify from this week of locker-room restlessness and restiveness is this: For all the issues confronting the Jets tonight, as they play the Dolphins in the first of what promises to be a season-long string of must-have games, is this:
You don’t hear a whole lot of angst about the Same Old Jets.
So there’s that.
But it isn’t only the Jets’ personalized history that can litter the sky with dark clouds. Sometimes history is meaningless. Sometimes statistics are meaningless. But they exist for a reason, and they always have a purpose, so there is this fact we should think about going forward with the Jets:
In the Super Bowl Era, 90 teams have qualified for the Big Game, and six of them — three winners, three losers — have suffered three-game losing streaks during the season, which happens to be the streak the Jets are sitting on right now. That’s seven percent. That’s not the kind of numerical nourishment an optimist likes with his cornflakes. And while we’re at it, we should give special notice to the 2002 Raiders.
For they are the only team — ever — to shake off a four-game losing streak and still make it to the big game, even if they did get crushed by the Buccaneers once they got there. One out of 90. That’s a little more than one percent. That’s what the Jets would be wise to avoid.
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“We had great veteran leadership starting with Rich Gannon, who was MVP of the league, and we had a lot of veteran guys who’d been around the league and had gone through the ups and downs of a season,” said Jets offensive line coach Bill Callahan, the one person on earth who can speak to the special difficulty of shrugging off a four-game losing streak, because he was the coach of those 2002 Raiders.
“We were close and we knew it,” Callahan said. “Two of those four games went to overtime, so we knew we were a good football team with good leaders and a good staff.”
Callahan pointed to one game that turned that season around, a Monday night at Denver. The Raiders carried that four-game slide into Invesco Field and buried a 6-2 Broncos team, 34-10.
Every team that has recovered from a losing streak has a story to tell, same as the Jets probably do. If not for the extracurriculars that surrounded them this week, the agenda the Jets surely would have pushed was this: How many teams do you know that would have survived a scheduling gauntlet such as this: at Oakland, at Baltimore, at New England?
The three teams that won the Big Game after suffering three-game losing streaks had those stories. The 2009 Saints were 13-0, lost Game 14, then mailed in the final two weeks. Understandable. The 2005 Steelers? They didn’t really get their sea legs until the playoffs. The 2000 Ravens? You saw the way they looked in the Super Bowl against the Giants. They were playing a lot differently in January than they were in October, when they lost their three straight.
“I wouldn’t have wanted to try and win a Super Bowl with the team we were in October,” Brian Billick said early in that Super Bowl week 11 years ago. “But I like my chances with this team.”
He had reason to. And Rex Ryan — the defensive line coach on that team, by the way — would like to have similar reason to feel that way, the moment the Jets can build a one-game winning streak again.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com