The recurring image is Bill Parcells, a few steps outside the visiting clubhouse at old Mile High Stadium in Denver, all the color having evacuated his face, all the life having escaped his shoulders.
“I’m exhausted, fellas,” Parcells whispered.
It was Jan. 17, 1999, and the Jets had come ever-so-close to touching the sky, not only because of the altitude but also because they’d seized a 10-0 lead on the defending-champion Broncos in the third quarter of the AFC Championship game. Then the Broncos came storming back, scoring the game’s final 23 points and ending the Jets season.
“You realize just how much work you have to go through just to get right back to where we are right now,” Parcells said that day. “Free agency. The draft. Voluntary workouts. Training camp. Sixteen games. All of it. Just to get right back to where we’re standing.”
It took the Jets 11 years to get back to where Parcells was standing that day in Colorado, 11 years and four coaches and two general managers and a new owner and too many false hopes and fake starts to count. Almost nine months after that game, Vinny Testaverde blew out his Achilles, and as soon as the tendon snapped the Jets were right back on the treadmill of pretenders, an exercise with which they have grown so familiar through the years.
But they are here now. They are back where they were on the day when Parcells leaned against that wall, looking like he might take a nap right there in the drafty corridor. He is long gone, but the Jets are coached now by a man who looks like he could fit quite nicely into any of the Tuna hand-me-downs that might still be lurking in the team’s attics.
Rex Ryan speaks of “Jets football,” using those two words to define whatever good things have fallen to the Jets across the past few months. Parcells was the one who first talked about “breaking the culture” of losing that strangled the Jets for so long, and in many ways what Ryan has done is finally resume Parcells’ plan after an 11-year gap — even if the only actual tie between Ryan and Parcells is Mike Tannenbaum, the former intern that Parcells took a shine too, now the grown-up GM who hired Ryan.
From the day Parcells was hired through the stunning 17-14 win they laid on the Chargers on Sunday, earning a first AFC Championship game berth since that gray day in Denver 11 years ago, the Jets are 114-104 including playoffs, and though that might not be a record a Rooney, a Davis or a Mara might want pressed between the pages of a scrapbook, it is easily the best 13-season stretch in Jets history.
In many ways, Ryan is the man the Jets have been searching for to complete what Parcells started. Now he gets the chance. Now he will take another underdog into another hostile setting (and you may recall that those 1998 Broncos also flirted with perfection, starting the season 13-0 before the Giants knocked them off).
Parcells would never say some of the things Ryan says, but he sure would have believed all of them. Ryan had no problem yesterday conceding that his team beat “the Colts JV” when they won at Indianapolis on Dec. 27. Having looked at the film of the Chargers game, Ryan smiled proudly and declared, “It showed what we thought it would.” And that was during a mostly milquetoast press conference. He’ll have a gem or two between now and Indianapolis.
The real similarities are evident: Parcells drew the best out of every player he ever coached, so much so that many followed him from station to station, place to place, like Deadheads in shoulder pads. Bart Scott and Jim Leonhard are two guys who bought into Ryan in Baltimore, followed him to New York, and hope to piggyback their way to the Super Bowl.
The good news: Ryan’s is a big enough back. They are big enough shoulders. Eleven years later, the Jets finally have found someone big enough to fit into the Tuna’s old clothes.