TEMPE – You can live with the occasional scuffling, if you must, diving into the muck with lesser teams, trudging off the field and issuing clever sound bites like, “They don’t ask you if it’s pretty, they only ask you if you won.”
Eventually, you have to do something else.
Eventually, with wild-card hopes attached to every ebb and flow of every snap of every game, you have to climb out of the mud, step out of the morass, and make a play, a big play, the kind of game-altering play for which the Patriots and Eagles seem to own the copyright.
“We can grind with the best of ’em,” Jets linebacker Jonathan Vilma said yesterday. “But every once in a while, you have to do something that hurts the other team, demoralizes them, makes them understand they aren’t going to win.”
Vilma played collegiately at Miami, the home office for such big plays the past few years. The Jets? Aside from Justin McCareins’ reach-and-lean last week, the last three weeks has been a numbing blur of second-and-6 and third-and-4. On both sides of the ball.
The Ravens made the Jets pay. The Browns tried, and couldn’t. Now, here were the Cardinals, dragging the Jets into another filthy mess. It was 6-3. The Cardinals had already slapped Quincy Carter silly. They’d already lost Emmitt Smith to a bum toe. They had Shaun King at quarterback, throwing the ball about as well as Kevin Brown did in Game 7 of the ALCS.
Still, the Jets couldn’t shake them.
“We were in,” Santana Moss said, “a very dangerous place.”
Then Carter threw a football into the clouds at Sun Devil Stadium, so high and so far that Chad Pennington, standing on the sidelines, said, “I didn’t think it was ever gonna come down,” but when it did, it landed right in Moss’ hands, on the dead run, amid two Cardinals. Fifteen yards later, Moss was in the end zone. The Jets were up 13-3.
But they weren’t finished. The Cardinals came back, attacking the Jets’ defense, chewing up yardage in chunks, driving to the Jets’ 21. King spotted Larry Fitzgerald on a post pattern. He threw it.
Vilma stepped in front. He picked it off.
And they still weren’t done. Josh McCown came in on the Cards’ next possession. Still plenty of time. He connected with Anquan Boldin for 12 yards, before Boldin was clobbered by cornerback David Barrett, an ex-Cardinal. Fumble. Vilma jumped on it. A few minutes later, with the Cardinals driving again, Barrett stepped in front of another McCown ball.
“You’ve got to make those kind of plays if you want to be a great team,” Barrett would say later, long after the Jets had wrapped this 13-3 win in cellophane for the long trip home to Hempstead. “We want to be a great team. We had to make those plays. And we did.”
It’s too easy to shake your head and point at the Cardinals, at their relentless ineptitude, same as it’s easy to look at the Jets’ other seven wins and plant asterisks next to them. But that overlooks one important fact.
“The game was there for the Cardinals to win, too,” the rookie said. “If they make the big plays, they’re the ones having these conversations.”
This is precisely the kind of blueprint the Jets covet, more than ever, as they dive into December. Maybe they get Pennington back next week. Maybe they can get to nine against the Texans, before holding their breath and greeting the varsity portion of their schedule, beginning with a field trip to Pittsburgh.
It’s really all the same. The Jets won’t blow anyone out, and won’t get blown out. The difference from now on will be the difference yesterday. All those big plays? They’ll have to make even more across the next month. Maybe this was an aberration. Or maybe the start of something special.
Come January, it’ll only the difference between taking their cuts in the playoffs or hitting the first few bags of driving range balls.