Jets’ McCown realistic in rout
OAKLAND, Calif. — Here’s one of the things that’s to Josh McCown’s advantage for all the things he has seen, and felt, and heard; for all the times he’s left football fields battered, bloodied and bruised; for all the times he was on the wrong side of a final score’s hypen:
You lose the ability to fool yourself.
You lose the young man’s failing of self-delusion.
So McCown wasn’t going to declare Sunday’s 45-20 Jets loss to the Raiders any kind of deceptive success. But he isn’t ready to declare that the sky is falling, either. He sees progress, which is nice, and so much more room to improve, which is better.
None of that may translate to anything terribly tangible. But in a lot of ways, it makes him the most honest man in the room.
“Sometimes you find yourself in different stages than other teams, and we’re a young group coming together for the first time,” he said after completing 17-of-25 passes for 166 yards and two touchdowns, while assembling a quarterback rating of 113.1.
“That’s a lesson we have to learn and we have to overcome. We’ll do that. It’s our first time experiencing something like that with this group and it’s disappointing because I feel like we had battled back after a slow start.”
McCown chose to look at small moments that showed the Jets may well be inching in the right direction, if not yet sprinting there. One such moment was the 34-yard touchdown pass he threw to Jermaine Kearse early in the second quarter that cut a 14-0 Raiders lead in half and came on third-and-2.
“That’s a credit to [offensive coordinator] John Morton because he talked about maybe, in third-and-short situations, we could maybe take a shot and push the ball downfield,” he said. “It’s a credit to him coming up with that design and having the wherewithal to call it because sometimes it’s easier to say, ‘Hey, let’s move the sticks.’”
The other was a surprising development on the Jets’ first possession of the second half, which burned up more than half of the third-quarter clock. Facing thirdand-18 from the Oakland 48, McCown was flushed from the pocket and dashed to an opening — one that was almost entirely on dirt, since the baseball diamond used by the Athletics at Oakland Coliseum is still in use.
“I wasn’t much of a base stealer in Little League,” he quipped.
But he said he was pleased that he used discretion at the end of the run.
“We preach about sliding, sliding, sliding. I could have tried to get a few extra yards and take a hit but I decided to slide and got scraped up pretty good. But that’s the cool part about playing in this stadium,” said McCown, who started nine games as a Raider here in 2007.