Thursday, December 20, 2012

The Agony and the Jets-tasy

Associated Press

Mark Sanchez, Rex Ryan and the 6-8 New York Jets are the most entertaining team in football.

This is a column about a 6-8 football team that failed to make the playoffs, and you may legitimately question the need for a column about a 6-8 football team that failed to make the playoffs, but let's be real: There are only a few days before Christmas, and nobody in your office is doing any real work anyway. That guy next to you has been looking at khakis on the J.Crew website since mid-October. Three other co-workers went out to a long holiday lunch and never came back. Someone in sales just ate the gingerbread house in the lobby. Not part of the gingerbread house. The whole house. It was built in 1979.

This is a column about the New York Jets. I don't know why people get furious at the New York Jets. They are the most entertaining team in football. Jim Carrey hasn't made a classic comedy in ages, and Adam Sandler's looking for one as well, but the Jets keep cranking out the laughs, week after week, like a hardworking vaudeville revue. The jokes are broad and accessible. Football likes to view itself as a sophisticated, intricate endeavor, but the Jets play a type of football a toddler could love. The quarterback�he ran into a guy's butt, and fumbled!

Monday, the Jets lost their eighth game of the season, to the Tennessee Titans. Both of these teams had as much of a chance of winning the Super Bowl as the Milwaukee Brewers, but the game was still a spectacle, because of the manner in which the Jets unraveled. Once again, the focus became the inefficiencies of New York's fourth-year quarterback, Mark Sanchez, who led the Jets to consecutive AFC championship appearances in the first two seasons of his career, but since then has regressed, as if his internal clock has rotated backward, like Benjamin Button's. Sanchez threw four interceptions in the game, and that happens to the best of them�Tom Brady has done it six times�but Sanchez's misfires can be excruciatingly laborious and forced. At times, Sanchez looks less like a professional quarterback throwing a football to his receivers, and more like a hotel guest flinging chair cushions off of the balcony into the pool.

Monday's game climaxed on a comical bungle, when the Jets�deep in Tennessee territory thanks to a botched punt�fumbled away a snap and the Titans recovered. The Jets finishing a season with an inexplicable fumble is the equivalent of Springsteen closing a four-hour concert with "Born to Run." Mike Tirico, the ESPN play-by-play announcer, was almost gleeful. "That's the way this game should end, that's the way the Jets season should end. Ugly, and a loss!" It was hard to watch Sanchez and New York's coach Rex Ryan try to get through their postgame news conferences. "It's a devastating loss," Ryan said, frozen-eyed.

A day later, Ryan announced that Sanchez would not be the quarterback for the season's penultimate game, that this Haz-Mat assignment would go to third-stringer Greg McElroy. McElroy is young and did lead New York to a modest 7-6 victory over Arizona a couple of weeks ago, but the team didn't even make him eligible to play against Tennessee. Watching the Jets make personnel decisions is like watching a manic person make a casserole out of items found in his car's glove compartment. It's all madness, no method.

Naturally, the big take-away wasn't Sanchez's benching or McElroy's ascension but the conspicuous snubbing of the team's quarterback understudy, Tim Tebow. Tebow was a bizarre acquisition for the Jets. Last season, the 25-year-old briefly ignited the NFL with a string of dramatic victories as quarterback of the Denver Broncos, but then Denver signed Peyton Manning and Tebow was off-loaded to the Jets, happy as ever to hoard insanity. But after making loud noises about a "wildcat" offense and employing Tebow as a kind of special-ops backup, the Jets haven't made much use of Tebow at all. For a team with no institutional history of self-control, this has been mystifying restraint. Tebow seems exactly the kind of irrational fun a reeling football team should seek. What do they have to lose? It's as if Rex Ryan got himself a hot pink Jet-Ski and left it out on the front lawn to rust.

Presumably the Jets have seen enough of Tebow in practice to decide he's not capable of leading them to four-interception losses. There's also the dubious conspiracy theory that the Jets coaches passed over Tebow because if Tebow were to play well in the final two games, it would make the coaches look more foolish than they already look now. Is McElroy the future? Last year after the Jets finished 8-8 and out of the playoffs, McElroy gave an interview with an Alabama radio station in which he said the Jets locker room was "not a fun place to be" and said it was the first time in his football career he'd been "around extremely selfish individuals." Now he appears to be the sane survivor.

This is the point at which common sense should take hold and the detached observer should ask, WHY ARE WE STILL TALKING ABOUT A 6-8 FOOTBALL TEAM? This is a reasonable ask�and to state the obvious, the over-obsession with the Jets is mostly driven by New York's profound, irritating love affair with itself. But there's also something to the very naked, public way that the Jets fall apart. Football teams enjoy styling themselves as polished, secretive, almost covert operations, but the Jets are a delicious hot mess, entertainingly uninhibited. The cameras from HBO's "Hard Knocks" left after one preseason of covering the Jets, but the reality show never stopped.

The Jets play the San Diego Chargers on Sunday, another tormented franchise that essentially operates as Jets West. This game was originally scheduled for prime time, but NBC has decided to downgrade it from 8:20 p.m. to 1 p.m., like a wedding planner calling a bride and regretfully explaining the wedding has been moved from the grand ballroom to the parking lot. Oh well. It should be a meaningless and brutal afternoon. It also should be pretty amusing. There are only a few days before Christmas, and all the Jets want is a break.

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