But Cromartie guaranteed Brady will be picking on him by telling the Daily News on Tuesday that he hates Brady and that he’s “an ass—-.”…

“I try to just throw where the guys are open,” Brady said Wednesday. “I don’t think I pick out players.”

Cromartie didn’t back off his comments, and Brady is not going to back off throwing at him….

Three years ago, during the Patriots’ undefeated regular season, Steelers safety Anthony Smith guaranteed Pittsburgh would beat New England. That didn’t work out so well. The Patriots won, 34-13, and Brady burned Smith for two touchdowns.

“Those plays just kind of came up as they did,” Brady said. “I don’t think there were plays on the call sheet to go after a particular player. That’s the way the reads went, and he happened to be there in those situations.”

Sure. Just like Brady’s reads will take him right to Cromartie on Sunday.

– Gary Myers, N.Y. Daily News.

That’s more than I usually like to excerpt from any one article, but Myers kept coming back to the same point. He seems to really think Tom Brady will now try to “pick on” or “throw at” Antonio Cromartie more than he would have if Cromartie didn’t call him an ass—- in public.

How can that be?

Does anyone really think Tom Brady — remarkable competitor, obvious ass—- and one of the best quarterbacks of all time — is going to change his game plan because of something someone said about him? Can it possibly work like that?

Of course Brady is going to throw Cromartie’s direction sometimes, but it’s going to have a lot more to do with Cromartie’s open man than Cromartie’s running mouth.

It seems almost insulting to Brady — and I’m all for insulting Brady, mind you — to suggest otherwise. He’s going to put aside doing everything he can to win a playoff football game to seek some petty vengeance? Tom Brady’s going to do that? Really?

As I suggested yesterday, I suspect that this type of thing is fun for fans and great for filling papers, but utterly meaningless in terms of the actual game on the field. These men are professional football players, even if some of them happen to wear man-UGGs.

Cromartie himself said, “They can have all the (bulletin-board) material that they want. It’s about what you do in between those white lines. They don’t care what we say in the media.”

In the interest of fairness — even though I have no interest in fairness — I present our man Mark Weinstein’s column for MSG.com. Mark, a Giants fan, has no patience for the Jets’ antics, though he stops far short of insinuating that they have any impact on the actual game. And he presents a pretty hilarious chart.