Patriots 19 Jets 10 - Week 2

Aaron Rodgers' offense scored 42 points in Green Bay, while the Jets scored 10 against Those Of Whom We Do Not Speak. It was a bad day for Brett, a bad day to be a Jets fan. Granted, Brett has to learn more of the playbook, but when he lead the team to a quick snap inside the five in the fourth quarter for which his colleagues were not prepared, he looked genuinely disappointed. "It's like we invited Brett Favre to our house," my wife said as we watched the Jets lose 19-10, "but there were no beverages to offer." Everywhere Jets fans seemed to wait for their team's timid offense to wake up and play. It did not. After a while, it was difficult to watch, a strangulation, a long march toward solemn defeat.

But watch it I did. I saw a limited running attack; a few good runs from Leon Washington and Thomas Jones, both of whom constitute the Jets' ground game. Many of our receivers were inactive for the game. There was a lot up the middle. My wife has been watching football with me for a while now, and I have patronizingly endured her complaints about how useless it is to run up the middle. Sometimes I feel the same way, but I always think there's a good explanation for it. But I felt the same way as she all game Sunday. All game. I didn't see Jay Feely's missed field goal in the first quarter because I was in the restroom. My trip was a result of a mistaken impression that his was a veritable chip shot through the posts. J-E-T-S.

Three runs up the middle in the first quarter went for naught. It's the mantra swarming the bare coverage the Jets will get this week in the New York media. We have the most explosive elderly quarterback in the game, and we keep going up the middle. Meanwhile New England ran screen passes to Wes Welker that the Jets appeared entirely unprepared to handle, which is ridiculous because we've all seen the Patriots run them before. These are the kind of plays that wear down a team down, but even more, they wear down the fan. This was the home opener, and by the midway point of the mildly distracting fourth quarter, the Jet faithful were already gathering as traffic on the Turnpike.

Kerry Rhodes had a great game, calling a sensible timeout that snuffed out a potential New England touchdown. Darrelle Revis played well, and the pass rush looked good. Our defense in the red zone looked good. Imagine if the defense had not been able to stop the Patriot touchdowns that were held to field goals: 35-10.

Listening to CBS didn't help. Jim Nance's recent memoir features pictures of the two George Bushes in the background, which makes sense. He sings with the winners. Shall I take the bitter pill? Hell, why not. His co-celebrant at the altar of Those Of Whom We Do Not Speak, Phil Simms, mispronounced Dustin Keller's last name as "Kellner." Ah well. Dustin's only a Jet.

"Well," I said, consoling myself, as Thomas Jones started picking up the running game a little too late, "the Jets are still kind of making a game of it."

"That's the spirit," said my wife.

I still don't know why she endures watching Jets games with me. She can obviously see that I don't actually enjoy it. I can't wait for it to start, but I can barely watch without sounding like a lost dog. Often I watch the game with a slackjacked expression. Even as I saw Laverneus Coles make that impressive gain in the first half to set up three successively unsuccessful runs up the middle, she must have seen me wordlessly moving myself to the edge of my chair and opening my mouth with a silent offering of devotion and hope - a "please" or maybe "don't drop the ball." These phrases really do crystallize the parallel emotions of a Jets fan as his team is driving. The closer they get to the goal line, the more that one feels that a turnover is imminent. The Jets' success is the bell; my anticipatory fear is dread's salivation.

Speaking of silence, how about the cavernous quiet of the Meadowlands in the fourth quarter? How quiet? The stadium was so silent that as the Patriots drove into the red zone for what would eventually be their last field goal, one could hear a lone manic whistler somewhere in the crowd. Like a shouting child in a parking garage who tries out his echo, the whistler seemed amazed at how his noise bounced around the vast space. It was mad in its endurance. At first it stood out in the same way that certain crowd noises do, and maybe the frustration I felt with the game forced it to the foreground of my brain. But how could anyone near the whistler have endured it for the five real minutes it went on and on? So sharp and piercing was the sound that one could not do anything but conclude that its owner had lost his mind. The agonizing game left the whistler with nothing to do but make a sound normally used by desperately stranded hikers in the mountains who are trying to attract the attention of search parties. It was intermittent only so that whistler could come up for air, and once he did, the piercing sound renewed again. It was a maddening cry for help. It went on and on and on.

Jets on the Cover of Sports Illustrated (Part 1)

I've been scrolling through the impressive vaults of Sports Illustrated, making many personal and socio-political observations to myself that will ultimately be fodder for a pithy blog entry at some point in the near future. What else would you expect? But I would be remiss if I did not point out this week's landmark of Brett Favre appearing on its cover, the first such Jets-related cover in very nearly 10 years.

Favre's appearance is a little late coming. I understand there was something called the 2008 Summer Olympics, with the swimming guy with the mutant-sized torso and the slick bathing suit, and the two blonde American dancing gymnastic dwarfs, and the portrait of a genocidal maniac overseeing the passing of the marathon, and the sight of Kobe Bryant getting a gold medal, and the extraordinary use of human beings as totalitarian art in the opening ceremonies. I heard about it. They did not have the tension, the soul-searching, the bitterness and regret associated with the arrival of a living legend to the Eugene O'Neill play known as the Gotham Football Club. Maybe it's me. But SI finally got on board with the big story. Thank you. Very. Much.

I don't know why this is such a big deal to me. It was certainly a big deal when I was little. I suppose that having grown up a suburban kid who looked forward to the Thursday delivery of the latest issue of Sports Illustrated, the magazine has always had a monolithic quality to me. But it did to everybody. SI was the industry standard that stood the test of time. Sport tried to be more like Esquire, but by the time the nation elected Bonzo's pal President, nobody liked to have monoliths wryly critiqued anymore. It was un-American, and SI remained very American while Sport lost its focus.

And during those formative years, circa 1978-1983 - which for me was late grade school to freshman year of high school - I was still unaffected by adolescent narcissism and therefore very much interested and curious about the world, its impressions, and values. I was still too young to know what any of it meant, but that to the extent that the world placed value on something, I was willing to pay attention. If the world at large valued the New York Jets for something - perhaps in the form of putting one of its players on the cover of America's biggest sports magazine - I was impressed and honored. I wanted the world's approval, so if the world paid attention to my football team for a week, it was a big deal.

And I mean featured on the cover, for the Jets made a cameo appearance for their loss to the Browns in the Divisional Playoff game of January 1987. But that's not what I'm talking about. That's related to an entirely other kind of psychological issue to which, I might argue, this entire blog is devoted.

Unfortunately for me, the only Jet featured on the cover during those years was Richard Todd, here being shown unloading the bread. Just as with the Brett Favre-Jets story, this August 1983 image comes a little too late to the career of Richard Todd, the successor of Joe Namath. The caption indicates that Richard Todd's career is reaching its crescendo, but Fate has already deemed it that he is done. The 1983 season ended with the Jets finishing injured and below .500, with Todd throwing 18 TD's to 26 INT's. I put the picture on my wall at home and even waited until Todd was traded to New Orleans to take it down. Had I been a little bit younger I might have left it up, for then Todd might have represented the achievement of the world recognizing that the Jets existed, that I existed. I had waited long enough. But I was already 14. I found that I couldn't control a brain addled by hormones and possessed of an inexplicable, unpredictable impatience with the world at large. Now, two words sprang to my lips every time I experienced a frustrating obstacle: Fuck it. The end of the 1983 season was both the end of Todd's career with the Jets and the end my childhood innocence.

Only two other players in Jets history have made it onto the cover. One is Keyshawn Johnson, here seen retrieving a pass in his great performance against the Jags in the Divisional Playoff game of January 1999, the game that sent the Jets to the AFC Championship. Why is he is there and not Vinny Testaverde or Curtis Martin? Because Keyshawn was the guy who, two season before, had professed a desire for the damn ball. Here the ball is just barely there, and with it the Jets are a long shot to go to the AFC Title game, their second since the merger. The rest is silence, a commodity that Keyshawn has never quite been known for, bless his undersized, ball-hogging, team-ditching, Parcells-loving soul. He made a great fumble recovery in that game that is still branded on my grateful brain. My first and only reaction to this cover during that week - among the happiest weeks of my life, I'm not ashamed to say - was why couldn't they have gotten a better picture of the helmet?

The only Jet left to mention had eight covers, and that would be Joe Namath, of course. As I've said before, Joe was bigger than the Jets and very nearly bigger than the sport he played. A story so large that only the silver screen could hope to contain it, albeit in the person of Jake Gyllenhaal. Yeah, right. Anyway, here is Joe's first SI photo in 1965, holding the soon-to-be outdated '64 Jets helmet. According to Mark Kriegel in Namath, the subject arrived very late for this photo shoot in Times Square. I'm imagining that afterwards the evening maintained its resilience under the increasingly gaudy neon light of mid-60's New York, complete with bar-hopping, club-tripping, taxi-jumping, stewardess-scooping - all still performed in the Jets uniform.

THE WOMAN: You play baseball?
BIFF: F-football.
THE WOMAN: Me too.

Or how about this one, portraying the crasser, more frank excess of the sexual revolution? Though this is meant to capture Namath cast as Captain Hollis in the forgettable 1970 western The Last Rebel, it really speaks to the perceived and real characters of Joe Willie. This is the Namath of the 70's. Who needs stewardesses? Now, nobody's making a secret out of it. Everybody's out to get laid. Everybody wants a piece of the big guy. I think the magazine wants to portray Joe as hating the thought of returning to practice; he's having so much fun, right? But I think that's Madison Avenue's misreading of the time. Come on, he seems to suggest, weighted with the fatigue one feels in the wake of extraordinary excess, Is this all there is? Existentially, Joe, perhaps not. But for the Jets, it's all downhill from here.

Click here for Part 2...

Can We Party (Like They Partied) Like It's 1999?

I've avoided thinking about this all week. I've avoided experiencing the strange, cruel elation that lurks within me when I think about it. I'm not a good person, really, when I consider that another person's misery is at the source of my happiness. But being a fan leaves you no other option. You are so reliant upon the well-being of other people whom you'll never meet in your life that it is inevitable for the fan to wish as much ill on his team's biggest rival as he does hope for a win each week. When the most important player on your biggest division rival goes down, it's a big deal. A big, terrible, happy deal. Nowhere else but in sports are you allowed (is that even the right word?) to wish ill on others.

The Patriots. Their position as dread rivals, their salaries and ancillary air of hubris drain all the sympathy from us when they fall. I will not lie. Tom Brady's agony last week was like a Christmas gift that you finally got but have given up wishing for, thinking that it would never come. In fact, last year I had this premonition of Brady's blowing out a knee in the opener, an experience that I suggested may have cursed the Jets in their first game against the Pats last year (as if the Pats needed a curse to be placed on their 2007 victims; they didn't even need to spy on the Jets). I remember what it was like, sitting in with a bunch of Patriots fans in 1999, dreading another day of student teaching on Monday, spirited by the notion that the Jets might repeat a division championship, watching their opener against New England. Then Vinny Testaverde's Achilles' tendon snapped, and with it every plan for success that season. The Jets went 8-8. I don't talk anymore to the friends/Patriot fans I was hanging around with that day. Their instinctive vitriolic joy at seeing Vinny on the ground writhing in agony made me sick to my stomach. These were guys with whom I had eaten in college every day, people with whom I had gotten drunk every weekend. I just walked out on them, and I have never looked back. As I've said before, some things are more important than the semblance of friendship.

Some people have suggested to me that it was a shame to see Brady go down because fans wanted to see how the Patriots rebounded from February. But I feel none of that. Let the mighty fall. No, I don't like wishing misery on someone else, even someone like Brady whose sense of his own infallibility blinded him to how effective the Giants' pass rush was going to be last February. (Ha!) But it was not enough. His humiliation was not complete. It is a terrible thing to say. It is: I feel satisfied that Tom Brady is out for the year. It has soothed the feelings of disappointment that have bothered me since September 1999. It may be unfair that I have lost sight of his soul in all of this. He's a fucking human being; I know this. But with its masks, its padding, its vastness, its excess, the sport encourages us to dehumanize these players to this point. It's a crap excuse, but if you're a football fan, you know it's true.

I blame football. One player makes all the difference in football, and he is the quarterback, the player on whom too much depends. Crushing the the quarterback's spirit has always been the objective in a sport that rests so precariously on that focal point. And this is a fault in the game, one even Vince Lombardi brought up again and again. Too much rests on a guy who would have benefited from a graduate course in Statistics at Rutgers, which lately is what a good QB needs. The Jets were not going to be successful with Pennington at QB, nor will they be with Favre if the old man comes up lame. The question of the Vikings' future rests with the growth of Tarvaris Jackson, which will probably never come. Matt Leinart is not going to cut it the way Jim Plunkett eventually did. Like Michael Vick, Vince Young is showing that a singular ability at one aspect at QB cannot account for the wealth of spontaneous decision-making he needs on the field. It was too much for one man when the quarterback called the plays himself; it's too much for one man now when he needs to memorize three other people's play calling. Just ask Billy Joe Hobert.

Will the peerless machine of New England get back into gear? Yes, and at the expense of the Jets, most likely. And don't forget Buffalo - they'll win the division if the Patriots don't. But now at least I feel that with Brady out, I can at least stop blaming Fate for a lack of trying. And even if this is not the beginning of the end of the Patriot Dynasty (and it is not) I can at least take comfort from the thought that maybe my old friends from college remember how rotten they were to Vinny and to me that day of seeming promise in September 1999.

Jets 20 Dolphins 14 - Week 1 (Part 2)

To see Brett Favre dance like an untrained firewalker after throwing his first Jets touchdown to Jerricho Cotchery was an unfamiliar sight to me, and not just because I still can't believe Favre is quarterbacking for us. I think I'm actually getting used it. It was Favre's well known joie de vivre, his pure trademark sense of joy that accompanies his play that has been almost altogether absent from my career as a Jets fan. It was something new cloaked in something, by football standards, quite old. It signaled in so many signs that there was a better way. It's still worth being very suspicious, of course. The team went through an exhale that turned into the equivalent of falling asleep on the couch in the fourth quarter.

Push 'em back,
Push 'em back.
Waaaaaay back.

And where was I? My parents were in town, so I obliged them by watching the Phillies-Mets game with them on the plasma set in their hotel room. Mom's a big Mets fan. I had already coached myself into following the Jets game on my wife's BlackBerry, down by down. I know I sound like the worst kind of phony by saying that, the biggest yuppie bastard. Can any man call himself a real fan, a real man, even, if that's the best he can do? Make his team a tertiary priority? But here's the thing. I live in a state with two teams - the Eagles and the Steelers - better known during World War II as the "Steagles" - one AFC team on CBS, one NFC team on Fox. If CBS feels generous, we get the Jets, but Sunday it was obviously feeling a bit on the miserly side what with Brett Favre's opener and all, and so no Jets game. Again, I do not own NFL Network. Again, sue me.

And Mom's devotion to the Mets is the real thing. It started somewhere in the early 80's. I'm not sure how, but there were a few odd days where suddenly Mom was paying more attention to baseball than she ever had before. She had been a Brooklyn Dodgers fan so the association was a completely authentic one. And coming as it did with the arrival of my awkward years, I don't really remember what started it exactly. I was probably too busy staring in the mirror that the feeble mustache under my nose that she assured me made me look "retarded."

And it wasn't that she jumped on a booming bandwagon. She started paying attention to them in about 1982/83, the George Bamberger to early Davey Johnson years. Instead of Gary Carter, Ray Knight, Lenny Dykstra, Darryl Strawberry and Kevin Mitchell, the Mets had Hubie Brooks, Mike Fitzgerald, George Foster, Dave Kingman and Ron Gardenhire. They were barely .500. Yet she got attached. Really, really attached. On the last day of eighth grade, I walked out of school ready for summer and to my surprise, Mom stood in front of the school bus and told Charlie and me to get into the car. Dad sat behind the wheel over in the parking lot. He shrugged at us.

"We're going to see the Mets tonight," she said. "Get in the car."

It's been pretty much like that ever since. Several years after the Mets won their last World Series, I was living at home right after college, doing a job interview over the phone which had to be interrupted so that I wouldn't have to speak over my mother's blood-curdling screams and curses coming from the other room. Gregg Jefferies had done something stupid at short.

And though Dad got me on the Jets in the first place, it's Mom whom I most resemble as a fan. She and I share the same feel for the omnipresent doom that circles our teams. Not again. Oh God. How could you do this to me? she asks as the Mets lost their way in the first game of the doubleheader against the Phillies. Pedro Martinez continued his long death march into oblivion, and the Mets simply refused to hit against the Phillies, the team that joyfully won the division last year. The game could not be mistaken for anything but a metaphor for the Metsies' howlingly insane collapse at the finish line of the NL East last year. Not again. God, no. No, no, no...

So what better time to check the score of the Jets game than when the Mets were losing bad? The damn BlackBerry froze on the Jets leading 20-7 with 11:00 left in the fourth quarter. It was getting late, and I knew - just as Mom knows the Mets might well blow the playoffs - that Miami had probably scored again and were threatening, with Brett Favre probably looking on helplessly from the bench. Sure enough, I managed to distract their attention and turned to CBS, who had decided to show the end of the game. I was right.

Pennington was on the 18 with three attempts to go and two timeouts. Now that seemed familiar. What the hell did you guys do? What happened? Damn it.

Blow the lead,
Blow the lead.
Please not again.

Within a few seconds, I am curled up in a ball on the end of my sofa, and no one - not my wife, my Mom or Dad - notices anything strange about the pleading sounds emanating from this ball of bones. Not again. Oh God. How could you do this to me? Not again!

Even Darrelle Revis' interception of the next pass looked like the usual portent. There was a flag on the play. You want to be released from the ball of tension on the sofa, but the little detail in the corner of the scoreboard onscreen reads "FLAG" in yellow. Sort of like the flag that fell on Mark Gastineau when he late hit Bernie Kosar; sort of like the flag that greeted the late hit on Drew Brees in the 2004 playoffs; sort of like the holding penalties and offsides flags that nullified about a season's worth of touchdowns by Wesley Walker in the 1980's.

And yet, upon closer examination it looked unequivocally like offensive pass interference. Revis made a great catch. It was never a question. The referees thought how lucky they were to have thrown a game-ending flag for a foul so flagrant. How lucky could they get? Another harrowing Jets win, and then it was quickly back to the Mets game, where the whimpering sounds of powerlessness could persist again unabated from a different part of the room. As mckeown.ian mentioned about his own experience on Sunday, "I had a terrible day today watching the Jets win." Agreed.

Jets 20 Dolphins 14 - Week 1 (Part I)

It's a shame that our disappointments resonate with us more profoundly than our joys and achievements. We seem to learn early on to mark our memory with humiliations, harsh correction of youth almost as if to steel ourselves against the unmet expectations of a mature life. One becomes unnaturally dependent on disappointment; it leaves us without a worry about the future, other than needing to brace for the next big blow against our good fortune. It's our armor. As a Jets fan, one gets accustomed to this stuff as if it were a threadbare childhood blanket on which a grown man might still rely when all else fails him in his insomniac wee small hours of helplessness, panic and fear. Surely there has to be a better way.

Someone asked me during the week, "Who do I pick?" They meant the football pool, of course. Even as we speak, all around my beloved country people are circling the winners for this week's football pool. In a nation that has made football - baseball's Harley-riding bastard half-brother - as its favorite, the game has become just another opportunity to build better bonding in the only really game that truly matters in America - your corporate job. Football players build their bodies into a state of fitness appropriate to their position to win the American salary lottery and die young. Meanwhile, the office pools that follow the results of their performances enable office people to feel as though they can endure yet another day in each other's company. It is a worthy sacrifice.

So, my co-workers ask me, as a Jets fan:

"OK, Roche. Miami-Jets. Who do I pick?"

Here comes that feeling of nauseous self-defeat building up in me - that hellish green effervescence of fear and loathing. This is no ordinary matter of which they speak. Can't I just indulge their simple request? It doesn't mean the same to them, and why should it? What's the big fucking deal?

"Ugghhh," I say, as if they have asked me to recite the Nicene Creed. "Yeeeah, um... Jesus. Miami, I guess."

They look at me with a look of surprise. They don't get it. "But,...you're a Jets fan."

I can't elude the sense of ominousness, the feeling that it's all for naught. I'm already thinking 0-1. This is the feeling that season openers always bring.

"Yeah, well, whatever." And that's the best I can do.

Earlier in the summer, there were the Fantasy Football people - the people for whom a single football team is not enough. No. Fantasy Football people imagine themselves as hiring mercenaries to do their work. They amass a hearty band of flamboyant wide receivers, tree-stump-legged running backs, and a bunch of underachieving young quarterbacks who operate with the same guile as little guys in the neighborhood who borrow their big brothers' cars.

"Right," says one co-worker, a Fantasy Football person. "OK." He shakes his head, expecting me to explain the meaning of it all. "Uh, OK. I had to pick one of your guys in the Fantasy draft, I think. A guy with a really freakin' weird name. I wrote it down." He produces a crumpled notepad paper that looks as though it has been retrieved from the back pockets of several pairs of pants. "Jerricho Stuckey." He looks up from what was probably a drunken scrawl, searching for his original reasoning. "So...is that...good?"

He doesn't know what he's talking about, but it's not his fault. Until Brett Favre came to the Jets there was literally no one outside of Gang Green Land whom anyone knew. He's talking about two separate human beings who will ultimately be responsible for two separate touchdown catches in the Jets' first victory of the 2008 season. It's not his fault that both men have unusual names. "Jerricho Cotchery" sounds like a distant cousin of Uncle Jesse on the Dukes of Hazzard, while "Chansi Stuckey" has a name that a grade school kid might give to a stuffed animal. But still. One can't help but be mischievous.

"I think you mean Chansi Cotchery, don't you?" I ask.

"Wait," he says, producing a pen. "Lemme write that down."

To be continued....

Best case scenario: 10-6

Worst case: 6-10

GU 63

The GU 63 on the field and on the uniforms for Gene Upshaw in tonight's opener between the Giants and the Redskins speaks to the justified respect the former NFLPA leader felt from both players and owners. The game would not be what it is tonight - a juggarnaut in American sport - were it not for his ability to find the common ground between the workers and their bosses. He endured the leadership of Pete Rozelle, Paul Taliagbue and Roger Goodell. Obviously Upshaw's legacy is, in part, affected by his hostility to the idea of compensating retired players whose debilitating handicaps are a direct result of football's violence. Tagliabue said that Upshaw thought about the larger picture of the game rather than the smaller issues. Rival offensive lineman Joe Delamielleure had another view, that the players were the game, unconditionally. His muted comments on Upshaw's death reflected a more critical view of Upshaw's legacy:

"The reality of life for all the guys who played in the NFL, including Gene, is that we have a short life span. It's just the way it is," he said. "I have sympathy for his family. I have sympathy for his wife and children. I didn't know Gene personally. I just knew him professionally."

Delamielleure is so fixated on his righteous point that he doesn't even bother to distinguish that Upshaw died of a long bout with cancer. Upshaw once said off the record that Delamielleure's activism on the issue of retired players' compensation made him want to break the former Bills' guard's neck. Delamielleure had the last word.