Unlike last year, NY Jets' Bart Scott offers no insults of Bills quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick.
We have grown accustomed to the bragging and boasting of Rex Ryan and his jolly green band of marauders.
For three years it has serenaded the ears of those who are routinely subjected to NFL coachspeak, which preaches the gospel of not ending up on someone’s locker room bulletin board.
Three miserable road losses muted the tongues of the verbose Ryan and his players. And then when the village malcontent, receiver Derrick Mason, popped off about Schotty workmanship on the offense and was given a one-way ticket to Houston, it seems the whole team went into a shell.
Fresh off a bye week that was preceded by two straight victories, the Jets are recharged. But they still haven’t found their voices. Following a “man’s practice” in pads, as Ryan called it on Wednesday afternoon, Gang Green was not in a mood to chirp. Too bad. That’s the missing ingredient.
Let’s face it, the Jets aren’t very interesting when they’re not talking trash or making outlandish predictions. There is something about a 4-3 record that makes a team just slightly less than pedestrian. And these Jets, the ones who were supposed to be on the way to the Super Bowl on rollerskates this year, aren’t supposed to be pedestrian.
The bold talk has always had a positive effect on the Jets. It forces them to play better to back it up. In the past, losing didn’t seem to take away their edge as the players were always confident that prosperity was always just around the corner. And that thought proved correct as the Jets made it all the way to the AFC Championship Game the last two years.
Ryan said there’s no drain on the Jets’ swagger even though they haven’t gotten off to the hot start that he anticipated at the beginning of the year when he boasted of their Super Bowl championship abilities.
“I really don’t think we lost it, but winning these last two games has certainly helped,” Ryan said. “The style of play is back to playing New York Jets football. So I would think just the opposite.”
With upcoming games against the two teams at the top of the division, the Jets not only have an opportunity to put themselves back at the top of the AFC East, but they also have a chance to sharpen their verbal needles.
Wasn’t it last year that linebacker Bart Scott referred to Buffalo’s Harvard-educated quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick as “Pinky and the Brain” because he has a large head. We miss that Bart Scott. We need Scott talking to raise the temperature of these rivalries.
Scott showed some flashes of his old form when a reporter asked him if some of the negative things written about the Jets the last few weeks could serve as motivation for the next two games.
“We don’t need to use you guys as motivation. We motivate ourselves. Our passion and our desire to win is for each other,” Scott said. “We don’t pay attention to what you guys say. At the end of the day, no offense, you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
Scott said there hasn’t been any loss of bravado for the Jets this year.
“We’ve faced adversity before,” he said. “Mark’s rookie year we experienced two three-game losing streaks. We still believe in each other and we still believe in our coaching staff. We believe that we can dig ourselves out of any hole. We don’t want to get in a hole, but we still believe it’s not over until it’s over. You could say that we had a bit of an identity crisis at the beginning of the year. But a lot of teams were trying to figure out how they were going to go about the season.”
There are a couple of things going against the Jets this week. They haven’t won a road game this year, which means that emphasis on winning at home this year has really taken hold. And under the Ryan regime the Jets haven’t fared well coming off the bye week. They’re 0-2, having lost to the Jaguars, 24-22, in 2009 and losing to the Packers, 9-0, in one of their worst games last season.
Working in the Jets’ favor is that they seem to be getting back to a formula that served them well the last couple of years and that is running the football to take some pressure off Mark Sanchez.
The Bills are no powerhouse against the run, giving up an average of 120 yards per game. Last year in two games, three Jets running backs went over 100 yards against Buffalo.
“Since it’s a long season at some point you have to come together as a team,” said Darrelle Revis. “That time that you want to click is around November so you can move on to December and be playing your best football.”
And hopefully the Jets can get their mouths back on track as well.
It’s dull around here.
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