Jets need to stop kidding themselves
MIAMI — It doesn’t matter that it didn’t matter, that even as the Jets were staggering off the Sun Life Stadium turf the Tennessee Titans were holding off the Houston Texans and officially forcing the Jets to tap out of the 2011 season on the first day of 2012.
So even if the Jets had chosen to be professional yesterday, played 60 minutes of representative football, this game would have been a footnote, as meaningless as the happy-talk pap so many of them tried to attach to what happened yesterday, and across the last six months.
“I’d prefer to focus on the positive,” Mark Sanchez said, and there you had one final bit of nonsense to toss on top of the heaping, rancid pile of rubbish this team assembled from the moment the lockout ended and they declared themselves favorites. Of self-delusion.
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So it was appropriate the Jets wouldn’t force their fans to agonize through the botched two-point conversion that settled the Titans-Texans game, that they wouldn’t extend their season even a couple of hours, see how things shook out in Cincinnati, or out west.
This season wasn’t lost yesterday, during this blindingly awful 19-17 loss to the Dolphins. It wasn’t lost in any of the individual implosions that pock-marked the season, the non-competitive efforts at Baltimore and Philadelphia, the two times the Patriots made them look like the junior varsity, the inexplicable self-immolations at Oakland and Denver.
Those were symptoms, compelling tells of a team’s rotting core. Across Rex Ryan’s first two years, the Jets were comprised of players — and, yes, a coach — who were flawed, imperfect, rough around the edges, but had the soul and the stomachs of winners.
The ’11 Jets were missing the fragile collection of gamers and tough guys — Thomas Jones, Damien Woody, Alan Faneca, even the best of Braylon Edwards to name a few — replaced by fill-ins who may look good in their uniforms but not so much inside a foxhole.
It was always a dubious choice to pin a captain’s “C” on Santonio Holmes’s chest, and all he did during the season-ending three-game avalanche was remind the world why a perennial contender like Pittsburgh was so eager to part with him, and illustrate why the letter best suited for his uniform is “P” — for “pariah.”
Yes. Pile on Holmes this morning, he deserves it. Take your shots at Mark Sanchez, who is becoming harder and harder to defend even among those of us who are inclined to do so. Kill the offensive line (a fair eye-for-an-eye deal, since they nearly killed Sanchez 40 times this year) and the offensive coordinator (who, even as his job status grew more and more tenuous churned out game plans that were more and more puzzling).
But understand that the things that made the Jets’ brain trust so endearing the last two years have caused the culture to sour, and quick. Woody Johnson trusts Mike Tannenbaum’s roster and cap skills implicitly, but the Jets were at least 10 percent weaker this year than they were last — and played the season millions of dollars under the cap.
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