Jets Hope Their Road Leads Home Next Season
Monday, January 24, 2011
FLORHAM PARK, N.J. — Mark Sanchez, wearing a black Jets cap and a green Jets T-shirt, walked to his locker Monday afternoon and tried to slap a happy face on another Jets season, as he had after another tough loss 365 days earlier.
Referring to Sunday’s loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers in the A.F.C. championship game, Sanchez said, “As hard as it is, we’re just knocking on the door.”
Like most of his teammates and Coach Rex Ryan, Sanchez was much more upbeat than downcast. Ryan told his players in a meeting Monday morning that they should be proud of themselves for being the only N.F.L. team to play in the last two conference championships.
Of course, the Jets lost both games — at Indianapolis and at Pittsburgh — as they tried to advance to the Super Bowl for the first time since 1969. In each of the last two seasons, the Jets won two playoff games on the road to get to the conference championship game.
“That’s about as tough as it gets, but we have ourselves to blame,” Ryan said at a news conference. “We’ve got to find a way to win our division. That’s no easy task.”
Winning a Super Bowl will remain the Jets’ goal as long as Ryan is their coach, but he established Goal 1a: the Jets can make it easier on themselves in the postseason next season by winning the A.F.C. East — beating out the New England Patriots, in other words.
As good as he thinks the Jets were, three road playoff games were too formidable for the second straight year. Even though the Steelers played well, he said, the Jets were uncharacteristically poor at tackling as they fell far behind in the first half.
“We weren’t able to get off the football field,” Jets linebacker Bart Scott said.
Being the upstart wild-card team caught up to the Jets. They lost the A.F.C. championship game a year earlier to the Colts because Indianapolis scored the last 24 points. Sunday’s game was a reversal; Pittsburgh scored the first 24.
To some Jets, like the veteran guard Brandon Moore, the loss to the Steelers was a hard way to end what had been a three-week joy ride.
Moore said: “We have a different standard here. We want to be a better team. We want to win a Super Bowl. That’s why I come to Cortland, and that’s why I go through the season and put my body through it, to play on for next week. Anything other than that, for me, is a failure.”
Ryan tried to make the loss a teaching point. Winning the A.F.C. East, Ryan said, is not simple because the Patriots rarely lose to other teams besides the Jets, who handed New England two of its three losses this season. But the Jets are capable of being more consistent.
“I think we were kind of gassed out,” running back Shonn Greene said of Sunday’s game.
The Jets and Patriots were 9-2 entering a Dec. 6 game that the Patriots won, 45-3. The Jets were also lackluster in a 10-6 loss to Miami six days later and lost to the Chicago Bears, 38-34, a week after beating the Steelers in Pittsburgh.
Three losses in four games put the Jets too far behind the Patriots to win the division and perhaps earn a first-round bye. The Jets never stopped saying they could win three straight road playoff games, and they did beat the Colts and the Patriots, but then the Steelers walloped them early.
“We are going to have to find a way to make this a huge thing of what we are,” Ryan said of the Jets, who lost three of eight regular-season home games. “You don’t come in here and beat us at home. Certainly, that’s the way we want to play our games, where you don’t have to travel, where you can sleep in your own bed, you know where the restaurants are, get into your routine.”
Many off-season challenges await the Jets — not the least of which is the fact that the league’s collective bargaining agreement expires in March. Wide receivers Braylon Edwards and Santonio Holmes, who developed good chemistry with Sanchez, become free agents.
Sanchez said Monday that he was optimistic that he would not need off-season surgery on his right shoulder. Ryan said he would like to retain as many Jets as he can, as well as the coaching staff, including the offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer.
Ryan talked about his players holding each other accountable during a potential lockout — “scary times,” he called it — by checking in with one another about keeping up with their off-season routines. He knows not everyone will be back. But the Jets can, and need to, be better.
“I think everything is going well for us,” cornerback Darrelle Revis said. “The last two A.F.C. championship games didn’t go well, but we can learn and move on.”
By DAVE CALDWELL, NYTimes
Published: January 24, 2011
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