Despite loss, Saleh confident — and his team is buying in

THE last time the Jets made the playoffs, the man in charge was so eager to let you know how good he thought his team was — and how good he thought its coach was — that he’d trip you if he didn’t think you’d filled your notebook or your tape recorder with enough solid-gold quotes elaborating on both.

Yes. Those were the days. Rex Ryan would step onto a podium and it really didn’t matter if the Jets had won or if they’d lost, Ryan would lead with his chin, and with his mouth. Most of the time it was entertaining as hell. Toward the end it got a little insufferable. But you always walked away with something.

Robert Saleh will never be confused with ol’ Rex, even though their shared pedigree is the defensive side of the ball. He isn’t quite as flamboyant in his confidence. But it’s sure there. We saw that right away, with his “receipts” comment that will sit forever in a prominent place of the Jets’ institutional memory. We’ve heard plenty of snippets.

Sunday, we got something else. Sunday, the Jets lost to the Bills at Orchard Park’s Highmark Stadium 20-12, a second straight loss at a time of the season when the Jets can ill afford a losing streak. They played with heart and they played with resilience, but when it came to the small details that differentiate good teams and better teams the Bills blew the Jets out. Still, Saleh was unbowed. “We’re gonna see these guys again,”

Saleh said.

And there you have it. It may have been jarring to hear but there is little room for interpretation what he meant. And later Saleh would indeed confirm that he’s not talking about the fall of 2023 and beyond.

If the Jets do meet the Bills again, it will be in the playoffs. It will be in Winter 2023. It will be in January.

“I think our team is good enough,” Saleh said, owning the idea. “We have a good football team. Nothing’s guaranteed. I just have faith in the guys in the locker room, faith in the coaching staff, faith in everyone associated with this team.”

Saleh, for one, is confident. Still. “Who would he be,” receiver Elijah Moore said, “if he wasn’t?”

Now, of course, the stakes attached to the business at hand begin to grow. Maybe the Jets are past the “innocent climb” portion of this season, but where they’ve arrived is a far more critical — and tenuous — place.

The Jets are 7-6. They are still very much in the playoff conversation. They could easily have solidified their status if they’d finished last week’s comeback in downtown Minneapolis, or if they’d played about 25 percent better, across the board, Sunday in the Buffalo suburbs. But they didn’t. Now there are four games left, and winning three seems an absolute must.

The first half of that challenge will come in two games within the space of five days, and for weeks this was looked at as the soft underbelly of the Jets’ remaining schedule — at MetLife Stadium against the Lions Sunday, back at MetLife Thursday against the Jaguars. But both Detroit and Jacksonville won Sunday. Both are playing much, much better.

The Jets should still win those games.

But now the Jets have to win those games if the season’s final road swing — at Seattle on New Year’s Day, at Miami a week later — is going to be meaningful. If the Jets are going to fulfill their coach’s prophesy, 10-7 is bare minimum.

“Not a guy in that locker room doesn’t think we’re not capable of so much more,” Saleh said.

We’ll see. The Bills were there for the taking but the Jets’ attention to detail was lacking all day, starting with C.J. Mosely getting deked into an encroachment penalty on fourth down late in the second quarter (leading directly to Buffalo’s ice-breaking first TD) to Michael Carter’s crippling fumble after a blocked punt and a safety had given the Jets fourth-quarter life.

They had more penalties than the Bills. They had two giveaways to the Bills’ none. Those aren’t things that can happen in a playoff push, and that doesn’t begin to factor in the injuries that erased Quinnen Williams from the final 2 ½ quarters and sent quarterback Mike White to the hospital after the game with busted-up ribs.

“We’ve got to lock in on small details,” center Connor McGovern said. “At this point it comes down to the most minute details on both sides.”

Said running back Bam Knight: “We’ve got four games to make this thing happen.”

Saleh believes it will. The players seem equally certain. That’s well, and that’s good, especially where the Jets were projected in preseason. But that was then. This is now: They need to find three wins in those four games to back their coach up. Back in the day, an old group of Jets did that a few times for Ryan. Can this group do the same for Saleh?