Ok, look, it wasn’t a perfect football game. There was the coin toss, for instance. The Jets lost that, and wound up having to receive the opening kickoff because every team that beats them at the coin toss chooses to defer because they know the Jets would prefer to start on defense.
Note to Rex: Work on coin-flip drills.
Then there was Mark Sanchez’s quarterback rating, a stat nobody much understands which had a standard definition of perfection: 158.3. Sanchez? He was at 123.4. That isn’t perfect. He threw three touchdowns, sure, but only 19 of his 27 passes ended up in Jets hands. One wound up in Bills hands. Seven wound up on the ground. Not perfect.
“I’ve got a lot to work on,” Sanchez said.
“I was thinking about benching him,” Ryan said.
And, well, that was the end of the charade: Ryan gave himself a chuckle with that one, and everyone else in the room laughed, too, and why shouldn’t Rex have been in a hell of a mood? The Jets dropped 48 points on a Buffalo team that was supposed to be some kind of defensive juggernaut, and they scored on them every way you can score them — on special teams, on defense, and most notably, 34 of them on offense.
Thirty-four points out of the offense? This lamented, lamentable offense?
“Our offense, we were on-point,” Santonio Holmes said.
Actually, the whole operation was. After an early misstep from Sanchez, an opening-drive interception that looked spliced out of the 2011 team video yearbook, the Jets played as tall and as well and as effectively as they have at any time under Ryan’s stewardship. Darrelle Revis, as he will do, seemed to say, “Let me fix this” and he did, picking off Ryan Fitzpatrick, picking up Sanchez.
And before you knew it, the afternoon turned into a scrimmage between the varsity and the JV. Sanchez connected with Jeremy Kerley and Stephen Hill. Kerley ran back a 68-yard punt. The Jets hounded the hapless Fitzpatrick on defense, never let Mario Williams get within breathing distance of Sanchez on offense (Williams, the Bills’ big-ticket free-agent acquisition, looked like a football Jason Bay, registering zero sacks and one tackle).
It was 27-7 at the half. It was 41-7 with 9:45 left in the third quarter. It ended 48-28 only because the Jets didn’t need to score 58. At the end, feeling antsy with the Bills shaving points off the lead, the Jets scored a final touchdown almost to prove they could. For kicks.
“I think we can be a great team,” Ryan said. “But you knew that.”
This is the mandatory portion of the column where we need to offer the surgeon general’s warning on hubris and swagger, and for that we’ll turn the paragraph over to Sanchez — “One game doesn’t make a season” — and to Holmes — “It’s only Week 1. Nobody ever won a Super Bowl based on what they did in Week 1.”
But, look, for the better part of nine months the Jets have had to endure a string of slings and arrows and indignities. They ended a season in chaos, bickering like grade-schoolers, then watched the grown-ups across town win the Super Bowl. They acquired the game’s most electric lightning rod in Tim Tebow, were accused of being carnival barkers and hucksters whose agenda placed winning football games way down on the checklist.
They scored 31 points the whole preseason. Scored exactly one touchdown. And that drive was guided by the third-string quarterback. Then they couldn’t sell out the home opener. It didn’t take much to see a bad moon rising, trouble on the way.
And then … this.
“I bought in, just like everyone else,” Sanchez said of the cocoon the Jets built out of necessity, the only way to stay on message. “It’s like Rex has told all of us: Everyone will see that we’re all bleeding green.”
They are this morning. They were yesterday afternoon. Give the Jets this: They never tire of surprising us. They are an imperfect team that enjoyed an almost perfect start to the season. It’s a long road from here to January. But they’ve backed out of the driveway without a hitch. It’s a start. And a good one.