SEATTLE – The snow started falling in thick sheets about 15 minutes before kickoff, kept falling, kept trying to do everyone a solid and make it virtually impossible to watch the Jets spit up all over themselves at Qwest Field. No such luck. Everyone could see who the better-prepared team was, the better-coached team, the better-quarterbacked team.
It was the one carrying the 3-11 record into the game.
The Jets? To listen to them afterward, giving their bloodless answers and their bland observations, it was hard to tell they had just been humiliated 13-3 by the Seahawks. It was impossible to know that they had just taken whatever hope lingered from this terrible tease of a season and splashed it into Puget Sound.
Very disappointed, said coach Eric Mangini, the room-temperature coach of this room-temperature team, in what amounts to a buffet-table-toppling diatribe from him. I feel badly because this is a good group of people, and a good group of players.
They just happen to be a lousy football team, especially when they are required to be a few notches above lousy, when the weather is brutal and the stakes are high, when there was still an opportunity to keep the division title within their grasp and within their control.
Forget the record, now 9-6: It lies. Forget those wins at New England and Tennessee, games that happened so long ago its possible Gerry Philbin and George Sauer made the game-winning plays in them. Forget the optical illusion that next week brings. The Patriots arent losing. The Ravens arent losing. The Jets are as dead as Lehman Brothers.
Lots of teams look like the 85 Bears in November. Real teams also find a way to win in December. Real coaches figure out how to match adjustments with opposing coaches, rather than get flattened week after week in the third quarter. Real defenses dont let someone named Mo Morris run free like Mercury Morris all afternoon.
What hurts, Brett Favre said, is that I think every player in here knows exactly what weve let slip through our fingers.
If thats really so, it would have been nice to see a little of that disappointment. But Jets players arent allowed to show anything. They are required to be emotional eunuchs like their coach, unmoved by circumstance or consequence. Show a little passion, a little flair, a little personality and humanity you wind up a non-person in Florham Park.
And this is what you get. This is the kind of performance you receive when you try and extract the blood and the sweat and the swagger from a football team, stacked up with equally pitiful efforts against San Francisco and Denver in the three weeks prior.
Mangini actually had the audacity to say his team played hard in practice all week, which proves he has officially detached himself from the grisly reality of where his team is and just how far it has fallen. For the second time in three weeks, he refused to gamble early in a game on fourth-and-short, exposing a pacifism that makes it impossible to conceive that he used to work for Bill Belichick.
His defense couldnt stop Morris, couldnt get itself off the field when it needed to. And his offense, game-planned by Brian Schottenheimer (who had better be working somewhere else next year if Mangini somehow survives) refused to utilize Thomas Jones early, and refused to be smart late, showing no rhyme, reason or rationale.
If we could play like we did against New England and Tennessee every week, boy, wed be hard to beat, Favre said.
They didnt need to be that good the past few weeks. They just needed to be professional, and prepared, and properly provoked. They were not. The Jets never got near the quarterback, never got near the end zone after Mangini blinked early, and now wont get anywhere near the playoffs.
I wish I could tell you why, Shaun Ellis said, a glum look on his face and a Mets stocking cap on his head, one of the most appropriate sartorial choices of all time.
Its simple, really. The Jets thought of everything when they built this roster except a heart to sustain it when the season really mattered. But, as a consolation, they apparently do play very hard in practice.