It's hard to write about a football team you love and care about in a blog without sounding pathetic and redundant. I'm going to be perfectly honest about that. I'm tired of writing about my feelings regarding this team when, well, to tell the truth, I'm too screwed up about how I feel during the season to really express any coherent thoughts. I'm a mess every weekend worrying about them, and the better they have to potential to be, the lousier I feel. I get this blank expression on my face most of the time, hanging around in my 12 or 28 jersey staring at the TV set, hoping for something that won't make me wince rather than hoping for a big play that will make me happy.

Which was appropriate for Monday night's game to be sure. It was painful, gut-wrenching. Not fun stuff. I figured out my next door neighbor was a Ravens fan. He has been kind enough not to gloat. But then this wasn't a blowout. The Ravens just strangle their opponents like a boa constrictor, watching the light in its prey's eyes slowly die out before ingesting it whole. He was worried that he was being too loud. He wasn't. When Kyle Wilson committed the pass interference that help set up the Ravens' lone touchdown, I took the Lord's name in vain so loudly that my wife told me that I sounded like the kind of man whom neighbors think beats his wife.

The Jets committed 14 horrible fouls throughout, the kind that reminded me of the heavily penalized teams of the early 80's that had all the potential to win the division but none of the luck or the discipline. The did talk big, they did swagger, and eventually all they did was make other teams shake their heads in bemusement. Nineteen eighty, Walton's first season, Parcells' last and Mangini's second - they all had the kind of promise that went into this new year, and they all leave my personal history with this team feeling empty and meaningless.

And then there's Inez Sainz. Of course my first reaction to all of this was to recall those whorish-looking babettes jiggling in front of the cameras during World Cup coverage on Univision and Telemundo. Still, wrong is wrong. In one week, the Jets coaches and players behaved in a way that has been rightly deemed inappropriate. (deep breath here) Even Rush Limbaugh said it was wrong to catcall Inez Sainz, although the next day he did say that the Jets were "celebrating her body." I mean, Rush is scumbag, after all. Still, when he's right, he's....well, never mind. The problem isn't really that a team of inhumanly sized men made animal farm noises at Mexico's idea of female sideline journalist, which includes a booty about which men with gold teeth often wax poetic. The real problem is that these two phenomena are made for each other in a sport mostly celebrated by lumpy and fat men like me. It's all wrong. Just all wrong.

I got sick watching the Ravens game, so I don't even know what I'll be like for New England on Sunday. I can't really write about it anymore. I've just got to go back to numbers, sweet numbers, because the past is filled with a disappointment that is comprehensible because it already happened, while the nature of the future's disappointment is unpredictable, leaving me with feelings of unspeakable dread. I believe what I'm actually describing is what my mental health care specialist would refer to as trauma. Ah well. Now let's go eat a god@#$ed snack.

NY Jets #24 - Part 2

"Who? I don't know who that it is. Once I step on the field it doesn't matter who's out there. I don't pay attention to numbers or names. I go out there and I focus on what I'm supposed to do. That's not a slight on him, or whoever he is. I just go out there and play football."

- Terrell Owens, quoted in Newsday, November 21, 2007

"Who?"

I'll tell you who. Contrary to the above sentiments of everybody's favorite sufferer of undiagnosed bipolar depression, our work is very much dedicated to to paying attention to numbers and names. And the man about whom Terrell Owens was speaking that day was Darrelle Revis, our current #24. The Cowboys made mincemeat of the Jets on Thanksgiving Day 2007. Owens scored one touchdown, and Revis had five tackles, but now, after three seasons we know exactly who that is.

One of the first things Rex Ryan said when he was first hired was that Darrelle Revis was the best cornerback in the game. I thought, well, maybe someday. And someday was last year, at which point he made himself the central point of one of the year's best defenses. Behold. His remarkable domination of Ochocinco in the season's last game and against the Chargers in the playoffs were things to which Jets fans are unaccustomed. We are accustomed to Bill Romanowski speaking ill of us and then pounding us in the divisional round. Revis' interceptions are like works of leaping, pirouetting choreography. He is a star. We have so few in the history of these numbers and names. This is what one looks like. This is no Albert Haynesworth. This is Darrelle Revis. That's who, Terrell. That's who.

Until the summer, and apparently now this season of 2010, rumors swirled that this was the week when Revis would sign for the team, but as Jets fans know, if an essential piece of a championship is missing, it will stay missing. I'm terrified now that it's all too late; that Revis has missed too much and won't be as effective as he would ordinarily have been. I know Rex Ryan has done much to bluster away the long, stale fog of bad fortune in our franchise's narrative, and he was right to insist in episode 1 of Hard Knocks that one man does not a team make. But he was also right in saying that Darrelle Revis is the best cornerback in the NFL, and among Jets fans, such a one is so unique that we cannot help but believe that one man will make all the difference. For so long, on any given Sunday, 11 men seemed to make absolutely no difference whatsoever. So why not one? This isn't a logical thing.

Darrelle Revis, contractually satisfied (a dramatization).

I wish they had signed him back sooner than Labor Day 2010. The club that keeps track of its conscession (sic) stats even in preseason should have been able to dig very, very deep much earlier and given one of its best investments exactly what he richly deserves. Yes, a contract is a contract, but as the white collar parasite CEO's of America will tell you (between taking sips of infant blood in diamond-studded carafes) there are always exceptions for people who are deemed indispensable. The Don Drapers of the world. I believe Darrelle Revis will be the last #24 in New York Jets history. That's what's important here. I don't want to have to write about another one. Call it greed or call it righteous indignation on his part. I believe Darrelle Revis is entitled to whatever he wants. If his contract made a specific demand that my Toyota Corolla to be handed over to him just so that he could bring it to his estate and light it on fire in front of his mighty entourage as a sacrificial sign of his power and glory, then that's fine. He can have it. (A talented colleague of mine has enabled you to see this conjured image for yourself). I can get up an hour early each day and take two trains to work. I just need the Jets to have a shot at the division before the 2011 lockout. As I would watch each station pass on the sunrise elevated blue line and stare out of its yellow windows, I would think to myself, "No, no. This is right. This is as it should be. This is good."

Ty Law

****

And now another modern football tale of, well, what else? - money. Salaries, the cap to supposedly contain them, the question of honor - all of these things are relative in the the angst-ridden world of pro football management. Number 24 Ty Law was a victim of franchise anxieties about the cap in New England and with the Jets. His one season with us was 2005, arguably his best as a pro. He had 10 interceptions, one of which was a stellar touchdown return against the Patriots the day after Christmas - a gift of sorts for Mr. Law because a year before, the Patriots had wanted to renegotiate with him to put themselves back under the cap. Bruised, he said that a "bridge was burned" with the Pats. Anybody who says this is fine by me. And what better way to celebrate this fissure with the Devil than with this belated Christmas gift of a touchdown pick?

But then of course the Jets made him a victim of the cap's anxieties a year later, and so Law went to play for another Jets-rejecting coach at Kansas City, Herman Edwards. Then in 2008 Law wanted back in New England. Bridge burned, bridge rebuilt.

Ray Mickens

The story becomes all the more poignant, or more likely cruel, when we consider the case of #24 Ray Mickens. As we mentioned, to cover themselves with the salary cap, the Patriots let Ty Law go in 2005, and the Jets picked him up. This made Ray Mickens, one of my personal favorite secondary players, very happy for the help he'd get in the secondary. "Unselfish one day," Karen Crouse wrote in the Times, "unemployed the next." With Law on the team just before the 2005 season, the Jets needed to fix their cap problems, and so they released Mickens and gave Law his number. After a year in Cleveland with no interceptions, the Jets resigned Mickens in 2006, ten years after Ritchie Kotite first drafted him. Then they immediately released Ray Mickens again. He was then picked up by New England to play four final games of his career with them in 2006. If these fellows did not make at least a million a year, I would almost bemoan the quandaries that the cap creates, but these guys know that it's not personal. Bridges never actually burn in the first place. That's the reality, and while the cap may theoretically encourage some parity among teams, most teams like the Jets achieve and lose that parity within a year or two partly because of these very issues.

BUT WAIT!! The rebuilt bridge got burned again!! Ty Law came back once more. He got signed by the Jets to play against the Pats the week of 11/10/08. "I know they're going to throw at me," he said to ESPN, "but I welcome the challenge -- bring it. I got the tricks for you." Ty Law seems to have retired after a year with Denver. He wore #22 while with the Jets again, and #26 with Denver.

Did you know that Darrelle Revis grew up in the same small hometown of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania as Ty Law? And that Revis also chose #24 as a tribute to the elder Law? "That's my little boy," Law said of the younger Revis. Even Darrelle Revis was somebody's little boy once. But wherever Ty Law is, wherever he goes, one thing's for sure. As soon as he's back working in anyone's lineup, for anyone, the laws of the universe will require that Ray Mickens will have to be released from something somewhere. A marriage. A prison. A demon. A job. A cobra's grip.

NY Jets #24 - Part 1

Leon Burton

He was a 1990 inductee into the Greater Flint Afro-American Hall of Fame. However, we're here tonight to honor Leon Burton as the first #24 in the history of the franchise. A standout back at Arizona State, Burton didn't play in the AFL very long. The Edsel of 1960's football clubs, the Titans were a bad place to start, and not a fair way to end your professional football career. I'm glad the folks at Flint had the decency to remember their native son, anyway.

Freeman McNeil

Freeman McNeil #24 was one of my favorite players from the 1980's. Smarting after years of watching the Jets play poorly, and knowing that our best player, no matter how good he was, was half-blind, it was exhilarating for me to watch McNeil as a second-year runner tear up defenses in 1982 and finish as the league's leading rusher - a distinction almost no Jets have had. (Have any? I should know that!) I resent the fact that he is included in ESPN's evaluation of historic Jets draft blunders. He might have played better, surely, through his career, and his promise dropped off as the Jets' underwhelmed us through most of the 80's, but he is no Lam Jones or Blair Thomas. I beg to differ. His breakaway touchdown (begin the link at the 1:46 mark) against the Browns in the 1987 Divisional Playoffs - stumbling, regaining himself and sprinting his way to the Dog Pound - is a still visceral memory of joy. We were going to the AFC Championship Game at Denver. Such brief joy. Then watch the rest of the Greatest Games segment, parts 6, 7, and 8 of 8, and you will understand how my adolescent sense of a benevolent universe gave way to a nihilism painted as black as night.

In 1992, Freeman McNeil was also the named person representing the players' interests in the McNeil vs. NFL case that helped rule against the NFL's efforts to sustain parity among teams by protecting up to 37 players from free agency, aka Plan B. The court ruled in favor of the players headed by McNeil, the man with the historically appropriate name of Freeman. As with Curt Flood, the ruling in McNeil's favor came too late, for that same year McNeil retired.

Freeman McNeil
(at his most calm)

I would add one more thing about McNeil, one of my all-time favorite Jets. I recent search on him produced this startling image of a man who looks as though he is hosting an episode of Masterpiece Theatre from the 10 yard-line of the Meadowlands, or better yet a main character for a summer network show about a football player who fights crime in his spare time. It's Freeman McNeil, chatting in the December 1997 issue of Pipe Smoke. This was the time before the Internet was destroying print matter, and there was a magazine for everything - taxidermists, tree doctors, dry cleaning, and pipe smokers. He speaks very well of Jets fans; he goes so far as to say that he felt the 1982 Strike Year team "was one of the best teams assembled in the history of the game," which I love, even if I'm inclined to disbelieve it. Freeman McNeil loves his pipe:

"My wife has a rule," says Freeman, 38. "No smoking in the house, or around the children. So I go outside with my Peterson and a cup of Earl Grey tea with sweet milk. It's very soothing. I'm at my most calm when I'm relaxing with my pipe and my tea."

When are you at your most calm? Are you ever at that point? I don't think I really have an answer to that. There's jogging, yoga, reading, biking, writing, meditation, but I haven't the discipline for any of these as consistently as I'd like. One presumes Freeman McNeil does some of those things in retirement even still. But would you begrudge this man his pipe? Not if you're a fair person. Not by a long shot. He looks too pleased with retirement for you to step in and be just another person to talk to him about the distant possibility of mouth cancer. Hell, no. He can keep smoking. He's Freeman McNeil.

****

Artimus Parker
(not deceased)

Behold #24 Artimus Parker. He was probably drafted high by the Eagles in 1974 after belonging to one of the greatest squads USC ever produced. He did snag four interceptions for the Eagles in 1975. Yet he would have to wait until 1977, his lone season with the Jets, and his last in the NFL, for another interception. I would love to know in which game that INT came, especially since it was good for a total of 45 yards. Somehow I had come under the impression that he had died in 2004, which he had not. Neither did I. We're both lucky men.

(deceased)

****

Was the late Johnny Sample really a dirty ball player? Number 24 was certainly confrontational, but in light of the more egregiously gruesome displays put on by Jack Tatum and the like, Sample was more of a trash talker than a "dirty" player, whatever that means. He relentlessly pushes and needles Fred Bilentnikoff after the play is done throughout the 1968 AFL Title Game, but it was Randy Beverly who tried to trip Fred's legs after he caught a Raiders touchdown in the first half. Sample was clearly a character absolutely indispensable to the Jets' morale in Super Bowl III, hectoring his former teammates on the Colts. After intercepting the ball near the Colts' goal line, Sample decorously places the ball on Willie Richardson's head.

Sample passed away last year. In an interview during NFL's Greatest Games discussion of Super Bowl III, done while Sample was still alive, Tom Matte insists that he would never speak to Johnny Sample if he saw him. His reasoning derives, we presume, in no small way from the event that transpired between the two during the game. In pursuing Matte during a 58 yard run, Sample failed to stop himself and apparently stepped on Matte's groin when Matte went down, compelling the offended party to get quickly to his feet and, accidentally, knock a few of an official's teeth out in the ensuing but brief donnybrook.

Johnny Sample did not step
on Tom Matte's groin

But let the truth now be told. Whatever frustration Matte felt was directed at the wrong man. He may not have liked Sample, but Johnny Sample did not step on Tom Matte's groin. I can't believe I know this, but from frequent viewing of the matter at hand (don't ask and stop laughing) I have seen the truth with my own eyes. The guilty party (and even here, it was probably an accident) is Jets lineman, #80 John Elliot. If anything, Sample might have been guilty of a late hit. After the play, Willie Richardson points at Sample as if to say that he's done something wrong. Watch it for yourself, beginning at the 7:22 mark. You be the judge. Is Tom Matte still right to hold a grudge against the late Johnny Sample? To my mind, Sample never denied doing it, so perhaps not. This may have been to serve his reputation as a dirty player. It's a strange game sometimes, and the men who play insist on behaving strangely.

It was strange for Jim Tiller, too, the second #24 in franchise history - a man with 11 games with the New York Titans to his NFL record, 43 yards rushing, no touchdowns. According to Titans' press material on Tiller, he "worked as a social worker during the offseason." It's not exactly the field of work I see football's toughest players going into, which might explain the terrible Titans that much more. But if Harry Wismer was in charge of dispensing information on his players to the press, can we ever really know the veracity of this information? Henry Ford was right. History is bunk.

NY Jets #19 - Part 2 (Includes Profanity)

While riding Amtrak from Philadelphia to Penn Station in the spring of 2000, a guy in the seat directly behind me, who certainly sounded at high decibel like someone from Jamaica, was nearly spitting in my ear while conversing to the person on the other end of his cell phone. He insisted, time and time again, that The Bitch left him with nothing. The bitch took his money. All his money.

"What am I gonna do?" he asked, over and over again - not so much even to the lucky person on the other end after a while, it seemed, but to the world and to God. "What the fuck am I gonna do?"

It went on like this the whole way. It was OK at first, maybe around Croydon, but it was really old by the time we reached Newark. I couldn't move my seat; there was nowhere else available in the car, and I wasn't about to risk losing it in an effort to look through the crowded train just because I couldn't stand hearing it over and over. The bitch left me with nothing. Nothing. What am I gonna do? New York wasn't far by then.

Finally, New York. I got up, and as he and I exited to our separate ways at the station, he caught sight of my New York Jets t-shirt and addressed me in a familiarly distressed tone, as if it were part of his ongoing troubles:

"No!"

I looked at him.

"Holy shit. What the fuck they gonna do without Keyshawn, now? Huh? They are so fucked. What they gonna do?"

Well, we know what Keyshawn Johnson #19 did. He won a Super Bowl with Tampa Bay that the Philadelphia Eagles should gone to and won. I still resent him for leaving the Jets for more money, more respect, more rings the way that I resented John Riggins for doing the same in 1976. But then Keyshawn went and got kicked off the Bucs a little while afterward. He was the first player of this era to whom I had ever heard of this happening. But regardless of where he went, Keyshawn was, deep down, always that petulantly difficult author/rookie on a 3-13 team. He was tall and singularly self-possessive to the point of narcissism, which laid the groundwork for all the headcase wide receivers to come - Randy Moss, Terrell Owens, Ochocinco, Braylon Edwards - and yet the Jets have not had a receiver of his caliber and height since then (including Braylon Edwards) so my friend on the train was right to worry after all.

The only thing he really did wrong was to slam Wayne Chrebet - someone who came to the Jets as a walk-on and not a first-round draft choice - in his 1995 book. And then, after being picked up by Tampa Bay, Keyshawn compared himself to Chrebet by saying. "You're trying to compare a flashlight to a star. Flashlights only last so long, a star is in the sky forever." Their careers are the same number of seasons, with Keyshawn finishing with 814 catches in 162 games, whereas Chrebet finished with 580 in 152. Hardly a star to a flashlight. To this day, Keyshawn's unkind words about Chrebet provide the lone basis for my judgment of him. You can see Keyshawn Johnson on ESPN as a talking head on Sundays, wearing the inexplicably bad suits that they put their talking heads in, but no one will retire his number anywhere because he could never be a part of a team for long enough.

Wayne Chrebet has lost a great deal more. He has lost much of his memory and cognitive function due to the frequency with which he was pounded on the field, and unlike Keyshawn, Wayne Chrebet will be immortal with us, for whatever that is worth to Wayne. Number 80 hasn't been worn by anyone lately, and it should be retired by Wayne Chrebet's only team. Star to a flashlight indeed.

****

Bobby Riley was a replacement wide receiver with the #19 for the scab New York Jets of 1987. I wonder if the squad has reunions.


Number 19 and former Jets quarterback Malcolm Wood's nickname is "Dick."

When did the name "Dick" became something a widely understood slang - scurrilous, profane and insulting? It must have been somewhere around the early-70's, after the declarations of the sexual revolution, just after the Nixon Administration, about when I first became a Jets fan. I don't exactly know when in grade school I first learned that among all the terms for the male member the most notable was "dick," but its usage was widening fast. Thus, when Dick Cheney became Vice President, the name and its bearer were already so inextricably linked as to be anticlimactic, redundant. Of course he was a dick. What kind of man shoots his friend in the face? Now I'm worried that Cheney's complete and overall dickness as a Dick has actually softened the impact of this all-purpose slur.

But talk about redundancy and bad luck, how about "Dick Wood?" When he was drafted in 1959 by the Baltimore Colts, the name Dick was perceived as no more poisonous to the common person than a basement lined with asbestos. But by 1979, most of my classmates named Richard were already nicknamed "Rich" or "Richie." Nobody was a Dick anymore. But Malcolm Wood was still Dick. That wasn't going to change just because society did.

Today the use of "dick" has been expanded to encompass the usage as noun, verb, and adjective - all pejorative, all useful, while "Dick Wood" is now the kind of name that intramural college whiffleball teams give themselves. Among Dicks, Dick Wood is still a lesser figure, despite throwing the first touchdown at Shea Stadium and being the most traveled quarterback among different AFL teams, which, when you think about it, may not be all that much of a compliment.

Yet he retains a distinction of having a name that scores high in repressed giggles, along with names that are even funnier, like Dick Trickle of NASCAR or Dick Pole of the Red Sox and Mariners in the 70's. And interestingly enough, Dick Wood coached his way back to the Jets, as running backs coach for a Richard - Ritchie - Kotite's 3-13 squad of 1995. Just a couple of Dicks.

NY Jets #19 - Part 1

Someone very close to me has a quote he uses almost unselfconsciously to describe his reaction to the status of life in general, and his words become more and more important to me as I get older. Is est quis est. It is what it is.

It's another version of Doris Day's que sera, sera, but with a little more acceptance of the present, not just the future, as an uncontrollable element of life. It is what it is. What is it? What it is. Accept it or not. It is only what it is - which is what it already is. This is not to rhetorically say, in the manner of Peggy Lee, est ut totus illic est ("Is That All There Is?") for what is is not actually all there is, but what is is what is.

Back in the early 1970's, it was common to greet someone with, "What it is?" as in "What's happening?" but the question soon became a statement - less a curious interrogative than a declarative of preemptive mutual acceptance: "What it is, my man." Slang changes quickly, though, and "What it is" is now long dated even among my Me Generation colleagues at work.

When I think about American culture in the span of my 41 years, I have to admit how much has changed in just the last decade. This morning, I corresponded with three people via Facebook and e-mail, whereas at college in the late 80's, I had to speak on the phone, by mail, or by face-to-face contact, none of which I'm particularly good at. This was also the case in 1971, when Chris Farasopoulos #19 first joined the New York Jets. In a very short period of time, within the last ten years, the world has gotten better at accommodating hermits like me. I'm not entirely sure that this is a step forward for civilization, but I am of a mind that all forms of progress - with the exception of cul-de-sac track housing and Twitter - are to the benefit of humanity. And it is what it is, anyway.

Two years ago, when I first did research on Chris Farasopoulos, I found a story that says he was initially offered a baseball contract with the Baltimore Orioles, which he apparently turned down because they asked him to shorten his name. He refused. It is what it is, he said. Accept what it is or not. Can you imagine any sports team trying to pull that today? Ask Troy Polamalu, whose hair is allowed to conceal his own name on his jersey and nearly his number. Times have changed for the better in a short span.

Of course, there's always the chance that the Orioles may simply have been trying to be polite in saying that Farasopolous' long "ethnic" name was the problem when it might, for all we know, have been his lack of ability, although that's a strange way of being polite. Luckily, the New York Jets were a team that welcomed eccentrics and individualists, so they were certainly capable of accepting someone on the squad whose only peculiarity was that he was born in Greece. Did Farasopolous feel cheated later that decade when Jon Lowenstein was allowed to keep his name on the back of his Orioles jersey? Does he feel cheated by progress' ironic sense of humor, especially when the Jets are a contender in their sport now (which wasn't the case in the 70's) but the Orioles are not? Nowadays the O's would take a Sri Lankan bowler like Muthumudalige Pushpakumara if they thought he could throw a curveball.

****

I don't have children, but if I had produced a son by some accident and were allowed to give him a name, it would almost certainly be Laveranues. It's a first name you can never spell correctly the first time. Laveranues Roche.

Sometimes people leave your life, then they come back. Then they leave again. Then they come back again. This is our team's relationship with Laveranues Coles, now #19. As we know, when he played for the Jets time and again, Coles wore #87. We wore #80 for the Redskins and #11 for the Bengals. David Clowney wears #87 for us now, and numbers 82 and 88 are taken by tight ends this summer. I think Number 80 has been kept special (though not retired) in the wake of Wayne Chrebet, as is #85, (for Wesley Walker). Dustin Keller is #81. Jerricho Cotchery is #89. That still left #84 and #83. Is it an insult to wear a number too close to your old number? I'm not going into why I disapprove of receivers wearing such low numbers. I just do. There's precedent for it, but linemen don't wear any numbers in the 80's anymore, so there's plenty of those ten digits to go around these days on any given squad, even with more tight ends than there were in the old days. A receiver shouldn't wear a quarterback's number. That's not the way God made us.

(NBC lists Coles' 1999 near $400 discount at Dillard's as one of the most bizarre sports scandals of all-time, which is silly. How many of us have received discounts from friends working at a major chain? When I was in grad school I got a $3.23 employee discount on a copy of Richard Bausch's Violence from a guy who worked at Borders back in 1992. Does that make me a criminal? Likewise who can blame Coles for stealing? College students and graduate students do their work for nothing, after all)

Coles' receiving numbers are a little bit better than most receivers. Compare him to - or confuse him with - Santana Moss who was drafted by the Jets out of the University of Miami a year after Coles (and who mocked him with a Dillard's bag, no doubt) and for whom he was once traded back to the Jets later on; we see that Coles' numbers are statistically better. Would it therefore have been an insult to wear #83, the number of a player for whom you were once traded by very same team that signed you on again, and then again?

It's actually nice to have Coles back one more time. He felt loyal to Chad Pennington in 2008 when people like me were willing to let him go in favor of Brett Favre. He never really seemed to buy Favre's act, and now it's fashionable for everyone to turn their nose up at Brett. He also sang with Elmo, which my wife loves. When sports figures really aren't supposed to admit any level of vulnerability, he also had the courage to open up about being a victim of childhood sexual abuse: it is what it is, he seemed to say, in hopes of helping others to come to terms with accepting what it is, too.

His second reappearance with us signals the twilight of his career, which I suppose explains why he wears a number that's, well, just available. He admitted that this is the end for him and that he will probably be gone as soon as Santonio Holmes is ready to play again. When you have to give up your old number to David Clowney, you know you are very near done. Other than giving up his old number, he is willing to accept what it is and that what will be, will be. Is est quis est quod quis ero, ero.

NY Jets #11 (Updated)

The years with which I have least connection as a Jets fan would have to be the years I was at college in New England. I just lost my way a little. One of those college years was also spent in England. The old one. And Tony Eason? Yeah #11 Tony Eason quarterbacked for the Jets as a backup from 1989 to 1990, my last two years at school. Put him up there with Frank Reich, Bubby Brister, Jack Trudeau, Boomer Esiason, Jay Fielder. Quarterback castaways. This is where the road mostly ends, fellas. Cast off your burden here, ye mighties but look upon this sight and despair. He played two seasons with the Jets in the Coslet years. And I cannot recall a single thing about his play with us. Sometimes it just works that way. I was at college, drinking very heavily, and working on deadlines. I had priorities, such as they were.

No. 11 Brian Hansen came to the Jets in 1994 when Louis Aguiar's directional punting didn't work out. He played five seasons with us, though when I look him up on the Jets' all-time roster, I see that his information is exactly the same as Don Silvestri's. So Brian Hansen enabled me to locate some errors on he New York Jets website. How about that. Yeah. (Time elapses) It's kind of hard to say interesting things about a punter. It's not Brian Hansen's fault.

The Jets had their share of guys who backed up Joe Namath in the 1970's, but the last to do it before Richard Todd was given the full-time job was Steve Joachim, #11 in that magic year of 1976. College coach that he was by nature, Lou Holtz must have noticed that Joachim won the Maxwell Award for excellence in college football after playing for Temple University. In 1974. Originally drafted in 1975 by - say it together - the Baltimore Colts, Joachim's statistics indicate "1G," one game, while his career indicates one team: the New York Jets. We do not know if he even so much as threw the ball.

Is this Patrick Ramsey's
only pass for the Jets?

In the continuing story of the weird rivalry between the Redskins and the Jets, #11 Patrick Ramsey traveled the other end of the pipeline to the Meadowlands. It always boggled my mind how intent Steve Spurrier was in keeping Patrick Ramsey at quarterback in DC. According to several records I checked, Patrick Ramsey has also the extraordinary distinction of having thrown one pass for the Jets all through the 2006 regular season. It is possible that depicted to the right is that selfsame pass. He was shipped to Denver where he played behind the guy who backed up Jay Cutler. How do you go through a whole season and get to throw one pass for a team? How do you not lose your mind?

Ed "Butch" Songin was a New York Titans #11 who apparently quarterbacked behind Al Dorow in 1962 after quarterbacking for the Boston Patriots the years before. We have no photographs, no stories, no images, no half-true anecdotes. To have been an unknown player on a team that was practically a rumor on even the AFL scene is a difficult burden to carry. The only thing I do know is that he passed out of this world on May 25, 1976, a relatively young man, no doubt. The cause of death remains unknown. RIP Butch.

Jim Turner has the unique distinction of being one of five New York Jets to grace the cover of Sports Illustrated. He is also a placekicker who's nickname is "Tank," a distinction normally reserved for nose tackles. The Football Issue of September 1969 (left) shows Jim putting the boot to it. He is the last of the straight-on kickers, for both the Jets and the NFL as a whole. He scored nine points of the Jets' 16 in Super Bowl III. If you own the NFL Greatest Games replay of the game, there is a great moment caught on the sideline where a clearly agitated Joe Namath is unhappy about not getting the ball closer for Jim Turner to kick a field goal. Placed in the strange position of reassuring his somewhat high maintenance field general, Tank just keeps saying over and over, "It's OK, Joe. It's OK. Don't worry about it. It's OK."

Troy Woodbury

Tory Woodbury? Anybody? Tory Woodbury? A running back and a backup quarterback in 2001? C'mon. Somebody's got to have something somewhere on this guy. This is crazy. I found more stuff on Butch Songin. What is this, exactly?

That was three years ago. If you go to JetsTwit, you'll get the answers that can only come when a writer takes a blog to the next level - analyzing Twitter content on the Jets in the blogosphere. Wish I had thought of that. Take a look at about 2:27 in the video at the bottom of the link, and you'll see Woodbury's first NFL catch, playing as one of several receivers filling in for injured Wayne Chrebet in a loss to Jacksonville in 2002. He promptly takes the ball to the sidelines at the end of the play.

Erik Ainge #3, #9, #10, (#8?)

Erik Ainge can't be the only Jet to have ever switched his number three times, but I can only find ones who've switched twice. If they've been renumbered thrice, it probably means they were on the practice squad. Maybe they were cut and brought back and then cut again, then brought back. There is the case of Ty Law who went from #24 and came back again at #22. Or Lonnie Young, who started out at #31 and ended up at #44, or Jim Hudson, who started out as #44 and ended up at #22. It happens.

When Erik Ainge was drafted in the spring of 2008, I swear to God he was initially given the #8. I feel quite sure of this. I don't think he ever wore the number, but I recall that the Jets' website first put him down as such. He's played nothing but preseason in his career, he's still listed as a backup quarterback in a franchise that has had its Bermuda Triangle at the position, but nothing can be more vexing for a pro - whether he plays or not - than to have his number changed as frequently as he has since he arrived. He wore #9 as a backup to the backup to Favre, which then became punter Steve Weatherford's number last year, which means he was never active. Backup to backup quarterbacks are trumped by punters.

In 2008, he was apparently caught on steroids and so therefore left off the team in training camp; I'm grateful that other more successful offenders did not test thus. When one glosses through the photographs documenting his years as a starting quarterback at the University of Tennessee, one truly begins to understand the humility men still feel when the game they played for nothing (nothing except the university's profit) in front of more than 100,000 paying customers at game at Neyland Stadium in Knoxville has been reduced to the working week of a man who has yet to be give a single start - a man without a number.

Then he got Pennington's #10 last year, with a couple of nice moments in preseason. Number 10 has a lot of importance, obviously. In my sentimental mind, I still think Pennington is my quarterback. I still imagine that I have to worry about his fitness for the year. I mean, is this an odd year or an even year, because it will affect Chad's elbow. But no. No Chad. More importantly for Ainge, #10 is the number he wore at Tennessee, which must have meant something to him. But now, no longer. Right now #10 is the big man in the corner of the end zone, Santonio Holmes.

By 2010, Ainge was #3, but that didn't last. His write-up on the Jets page has indicated nothing more than his collegiate statistics. But what many of us didn't know was how bad off he was from the very beginning. According to Zachary Rhymer at Bleacher Report, Ainge has had a bad, bad journey down into the hell of painkiller addiction, one that predated his arrival with the Jets. In this sense, the apparent steroid issue in 2008 was small potatoes. According to his piece, Rhymer quotes an ESPN interview with Ainge, who claims that while still at Tennessee, he would take 25 percocets at a pop. His dependency, apparently, began with a broken finger.

Ironically, his finger was part of an easy barb I made. Initially, Erik Ainge stoked my bitterness about being a public school teacher who's paid a lot less than an NFL bench warmer. "It's not (his) fault," I initially said, "that the invisible hand of our society gives me the bird every day. I mean, look. I start at my position every day." But as the link points out, now with the NFL Lockout, Ainge can't get insurance to cover his ongoing addiction recovery. Now, I just feel that whatever number he wears, Ainge will have to deal with one day at a time in a way that non-addicts can only guess at. If you have not had to look at life with the constant white static of addiction fizzing in your brain, then you are lucky. Addiction has a grip much stronger than the fickle comfort of the invisible hand.