Here Come The Warm Jets: Week 1

No one understands the real deal with this Jets game.

See, this was obviously all part of Mangini’s plan. He figured they can afford to lose one game. So why not lose a game really badly early on? That way, the expectations are super-low for the team. The guys don’t get too full of themselves. The Daily News isn’t putting them in the Super Bowl after week 2. This way he can have the team’s full attention, and get a lot of credit if the team looks remotely competent the rest of the year.

It’s the same lowered-expectation strategy they used for George W. Bush in 2000 when he debated Al Gore. And look what that did for W. Yeah, that’s it. Mangini is just coaching like Karl Rove runs political campaigns. Next thing Belichick gets accused of fathering a black baby in South Carolina. Ah, that Mangenius. Gotta love him.


Alright, delusional ranting over.

Let’s just get it out there: The Patriots kicked ass. Thoroughly and unquestionably.

Let’s also get this out there: This does not mean that the Jets are a horrible team. They got beat by the best team in the league. This will probably happen to most teams this year.

Generally speaking, I like what the coaching staff tries to do. They are well prepared, they pay attention to detail, and they come up with creative game plans specific to the opposition and designed to maximize what they can do given the talent on the team and the weaknesses of the other team.

Against the Patriots, two things are obvious:

1 – The Patriots don’t have many weaknesses.

2 – The Jets don’t have enough talent to maximize against a team this good. Especially on the offensive and defensive lines.

I’m not going to talk much about the fans booing Pennington (stupid, but they were getting embarrassed at home by their hated rivals, so what do you expect 70k drunk people to do?) or the Patriots getting accused of cheating (virtually irrelevant for a game like this.)

What it comes down to is that the Jets simply are not an elite team in the NFL. An elite team can not play their best and still have a chance to win (see the Chargers against the Bears, for example.) The Jets will beat teams they are supposed to beat. They will be competitive in the majority of games. But if they’re playing one of the elite teams, things have to go absolutely perfectly for them to even be in it.

That to me is the most frustrating thing. For the 20+ years I’ve been a Jets fan, the team has never been one of the elite teams in the league. Even in the best of years, like the 12-4 1998 version that went to the AFC championship game, they weren’t considered elite. I’d like that to happen in my lifetime. I want to know what it’s like to expect my team to win instead of expecting to be annoyed and cursing a lot on Sundays.

This year, I think they’ll be more competitive than they looked against the Pats. They’ll still win 8 to 10 games, and be in contention for the playoffs. But even if they make the playoffs, they won’t win the Super Bowl. They probably won’t even win a playoff game.

So it’s another year of waiting for another year. I’ll keep watching though. Jets fans are nothing if not masochistic.