FOR JETS, ‘D’ IS KEY

When it was all on the line and allin for the Jets on the last game of the regular season, when all they had to do was beat Rex Ryan and the Bills to make the playoffs, they could not. You never know where to rank these heartbreak games for Jets fans because there have been so many of them over the nearly half-century since their team won its one and only Super Bowl. But this was still a pretty good heartbreak game because the Jets had done so much across the first 15 games to convince their fans that if they got into the tournament, they could make a run.

You know there has always been an old Brooklyn Dodgers feel to the modern Jets, and their fans. Those fans are always waiting ’til next year. Now next year had begun again for them in Buffalo, appropriately enough, on the first Sunday of January.

Ryan Fitzpatrick, who’d had some season for the Jets until then, reminded you why he seems to have played for just about everybody in his pro career except the Pottstown Jets. The Giants were already out of the playoffs, again; somehow under Tom Coughlin the Giants never won a single postseason game when they weren’t winning a couple of Super Bowls. So it was set up for the Jets to have the stage to themselves in January, at least around here, the way they did in Rex’s first two seasons coaching the team.

Only they lost. To Rex. Who used to coach them in heartbreak games. This wasn’t losing to the Dolphins in the mud or to John Elway in that AFC championship game in Denver when Bill Parcells was the coach and they were ahead 10-0 at halftime; when they were that close to the big game. It wasn’t the missed field goals against the Steelers that time under Herm Edwards, or Rex’s second AFC championship game, at Heinz Field, when the Jets scared the Steelers to death in the fourth quarter but came up short of the Super Bowl.

Eight months after they were once again the Same Old Jets in Buffalo, they try to be better than that. And maybe much better. Todd Bowles starts his second season with a defense that might turn out to be as good as any in the AFC, at least outside of Denver. Fitzpatrick is back on a one-year deal and with a lot to prove, a chance to show that he’s worth the kind of big quarterback money he thought he was worth in the offseason. And of course Touchdown Tom Brady is going to miss the first four games, a gift to the Jets presented by Commissioner Roger Goodell because of the most wrong-headed suspension in NFL history.

You add it all up, even against a schedule in the early going that looks like a rock fight, and you see what a big chance there is for the Jets this season to take the AFC East from the Patriots, and maybe do a lot more than that.

The Jets didn’t get to make any kind of Super Bowl run last season for the simple reason that they couldn’t make it out of Buffalo. But they then watched the Broncos win it all with a quarterback, Peyton Manning, completing 13 of 21 passes for 146 yards and a quarterback rating of 56.6. We talk all the time about looking back over the last 25 years of Super Bowl champions, seeing how most of the time you need a star quarterback, and often an immortal, to win it all. Oh, Peyton Manning was a star in Santa Clara, you bet. Just not a star quarterback anymore, or even close. He was barely better than Ben Roethlisberger was at Ford Field one time when the Steelers survived him to win it all. The big quarterback in Santa Clara was supposed to be Cam Newton, whose Panthers had only lost one game, who were supposed to be on their way to 18-1 until they ran into Von Miller and his friends as if running into a straight right hand. Only the glamour kid and the glamour offense didn’t win the big game. Defense did. It was Parcells, after his Giants won their second Super Bowl, this one in Tampa, shutting down a Bills offense that had scored 51 points in the AFC championship game that year, who raised a fist in the Giants’ locker room and said, “Power wins.” I don’t know if Bowles’ defense has that kind of power. But it might. The only time the Jets really got Belichick and Brady, got them good, was when Rex’s power defense and Mark Sanchez went into Foxborough that time and beat the 14-2 Patriots, shocked them and the world, and went back to that second AFC championship game against the Steelers. So even if the Patriots have a nightmare start without Brady, you don’t bet against them. The last time the Patriots didn’t win the AFC East was when Brady was hurt and Matt Cassel was the quarterback. They still went 11-5 that year. But if the Jets aren’t going to take the AFC East from them this year, then when? Seriously? If the Broncos could do what they did in January, and then on the first Sunday in February, with Peyton getting by on offspeed stuff, how much is Bowles going to need out of Fitzpatrick and the guys on offense?

When he was asked the other day about what he wanted to see from his offense against the Giants on Saturday night, Bowles simply talked about “cohesiveness and chemistry.” It was right before somebody asked him how much the Snoopy Bowl meant to him and he said, “Not much.”

You know about how much hoo-haw was associated with Jets vs. Giants in the preseason when Rex was around. Things were much more quiet around the Jets last season, all the way to Buffalo, on the day when Rex got to act as if he’d somehow made the playoffs because the Bills knocked the Jets out of them.

There is a chance here for the Jets to make some real noise this season. All the years since Namath, we have been waiting for another Namath to come along. But there are a lot of statistics we all overlook because of the dazzling romance of what Namath did in Super Bowl III, a career that saw more interceptions than touchdown passes, a Super Bowl MVP award even though he didn’t throw a touchdown pass against the Colts.

Maybe what Jets fans really should have been waiting for is a defense like this. Twice the Jets made it to the championship game with Mark Sanchez. They saw the game that Peyton played in Santa Clara. You never get your hopes up too high with the Jets. They have been as much a heartbreak team as any we have had around here since Namath. There have been all the times when they came close. And then Gastineau got called for a penalty. Or Keith Byars dropped the ball.

This defense, though, gives Jets fans hope. Fitzpatrick doesn’t have to be great. Just better than he was in Buffalo. Next year has to come along one of these years for the Jets and their fans.

Why not this year?