The Jets sit 60 minutes from the Super Bowl, and it is impossible not to see an army of unsuspecting butterflies positioned throughout the world, all of them having helped make all of this a reality.
Scientists call this the “chaos theory,” and there are a good chunk of football teams in the AFC that would surely agree, that will now surely believe that a butterfly flapping his wings a certain way in rural New Jersey can help cause a typhoon in China.
We’ve seen this “butterfly effect” in action. Constantly. Consider:
Butterfly I: Woody Johnson has a planned vacation outside the country to ring in 2009. He chooses not to cancel. He is therefore not available to talk to Bill Cowher, everyone’s consensus choice to replace Eric Mangini. Cowher pulls out. The Jets turn elsewhere. And on Jan. 19, a day after his team is beaten in the AFC Championship game in Pittsburgh, the Jets hire Ravens defensive coordinator Rex Ryan.
Butterfly II: Abram Elam had signed a $1.5 million offer sheet with Mangini’s new team, the Browns, and the Jets had matched it, meaning that by rule the Jets weren’t permitted to trade the safety to Cleveland within a year of the deal. Unless Elam granted permission. Elam was a fine player in 2008; most Jets fans couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. But before Mangini would sign off on the draft-day deal that delivered the No. 5 pick, Elam had to give his OK. There was no compelling reason for him to do that. He did it anyway. The Jets took Mark Sanchez at No. 5.
Butterfly III: Mike Tannenbaum says today it would never occur to him to move up twice in the space of three rounds. It’s too complicated, too nerve-wracking, too risky, too costly. But Shonn Greene was the 19th-best player on the Jets draft board, and as round 3 opened, was still available. Anthony Lynn, the running backs coach, compared him to Curtis Martin. Tannenbaum listened. He made a deal with the Lions. He picked Greene.
Butterfly IV: Maybe the most imperceptible (and busiest) one of all, dressed up in a tiny silver-and-black uniform. In the space of five weeks, the woeful Raiders beat the Bengals, the Steelers and the Broncos, the latter two on the road. No one can possibly know it yet. But those gut-punchers keep Pittsburgh and Denver out of the playoffs, and prevent the Bengals from having any chance of playing for a bye in Week 17, stripping Cincinnati of any motivation to treat the season finale with even a trace of urgency.
See, these were the barely perceptible ground-shifts that allowed everything else to happen. An owner flies out of the country. A player declines to play hardball. A GM goes against his instinct and listens to his lieutenants. And a team the Jets beat worse than any other on their schedule — 38-0 — winds up serving as the best kind of wing man for them later on. Butterflies flapping their wings.
We can focus on what happened in Week 16, when everyone who needed to lose lost, when the Colts decided to pick up their ball and go home and all but gift-wrapped a belated Christmas present for the Jets. We can illuminate Week 17, when the Bengals surrendered on national television. We can have a discussion about how even the playoffs broke right, how the Jets were fortunate to draw the Bengals instead of the Patriots in the wild-card round, how it was a break to put off this Indianapolis rematch by a week when the Ravens upset New England. All of that may well be true.
But the Perfect Storm that delivered the Jets where they sit today, 48 hours away from a 60-minute match for the Super Bowl — didn’t start with those late-season rain clouds. It started weeks earlier, months earlier, more than a year earlier, when a couple of invisible butterflies started flapping their wings. And look at where we are now.