NFL

Plenty of blame to go around for Jets

BOTTOMED OUT: Rex Ryan tries to search for words after last night’s woeful 14-10 loss to the Titans eliminated the Jets from any hopes of making the playoffs. (N.Y. Post: Charles Wenzelberg)

NASHVILLE — The record will show the 2012 Jets season expired 32 yards away from the end zone with 43 seconds left in one of the ugliest football games the mind could possibly conjure.

The record will show that Nick Mangold flubbed his snap, that Mark Sanchez couldn’t pluck the ball off the ground, that it glanced off Bilal Powell’s foot and finally came to rest under the delighted torso of Titans linebacker Zach Brown.

The record will reflect that Tennessee quarterback Jake Locker took a knee, let the clock melt away, cinched a 14-10 victory that would have made Amos Alonzo Stagg weep, catapulted the Jets into what would surely have been their longest off-season ever, now grown extra large thanks to two meaningless games.

“That,” coach Rex Ryan said, in a voice barely north of a whisper, “is a devastating loss.”

The record will insist losing this game snuffed the Jets’ playoff hopes, that whatever combination of fortuitous breaks and bounces they would have needed even with an escape, none of it matters any more. The record will insist this all became official at 10:39, Central Time, when the final gun finally shattered the Tennessee night.

Of course, the record will tell only part of the story. It won’t include the woefully thin roster the front office tried all summer to sell as playoff-worthy. It won’t give voice to the string of horrendous performances that buttressed this buffoonery — blowout losses and thrown-away losses and even a gaggle of wins that felt like losses.

Yes, the record will reflect the destruction of a quarterback, will detail the decimation of Mark Sanchez’s career, capped by the four interceptions he threw last night, what may well be the last night of his career as a franchise centerpiece.

But it will give scant justice to the carnival into which he was thrust once his owner (or whomever) became hopelessly enchanted by Tim Tebow, a sideshow that hijacked the summer and never let go, even to last night; Sanchez was actually playing well, had led two substantive drives, and that’s when Tony Sparano decided to finally give Tebow his first full series of the season. In week 15. Beautiful. We now officially know Sparano’s record in Miami was no fluke.

Was it a coincidence Sanchez only started throwing picks last night after the Tebow interlude? Maybe it was. Sanchez hasn’t needed specs to start flailing the ball all year long. Or maybe it was just one more shovel of dirt piled on top of a once-promising career.

Sanchez is the easy target. He always is. But it’s the whole operation that’s on the clock now. Sparano is the first one out the door; if a playoff-bound team can whack its offensive coordinator, as the Ravens did to Cam Cameron last week, Sparano’s comedic stylings should be exiled as soon as possible, with little need to wait for Week 17. Maybe he wasn’t graced with Hall of Fame talent but Sparano’s body of work this year has been amateurish at best, incompetent at worst.

Ryan? I would give him one more year, with a specific task: enough with reciting facts and figures after losses, enough benign detachment from the offense, enough living vicariously through the defense. If he wants to be a coordinator again, that can be arranged very easily. If he wants to be a head coach, prove it. Force-feed accountability. And hire someone who can tell an X from an O on the offensive side of the ball.

As for general manager Mike Tannenbaum, he delights in presenting the Jets’ record in the big picture, delights in reminding everyone how this is, in many ways, the golden age of Jets history. If that’s so, it is only a reminder of how truly wretched much of that history is. If this season has taught him anything, it should be this: He and the other men who run the Jets have not cornered the market on football wisdom.

Let the record show the Jets’ season died on Dec. 17 but was a calamity in waiting from July 17. This is on everybody. If everybody pays, it’s a bill they’ve earned. All across five brutal months.