It would be hard to recap the Jets’ loss to the Broncos last night in the manner in which I’d like while maintaining anything close to the totally reasonable standards of decency set forth by this network of websites.
Picture all of the worst and nastiest and most grotesque things you ever saw on the Internet in its earliest days — when you still had the capacity to be shocked by things on the Internet — put into words. That’s what I’d like to say about the Jets’ loss to the Broncos last night.
It sucked. A couple of things, though: First, let’s not all destroy Mark Sanchez for that one. He didn’t have a great game, for sure. He made a few awful passes — notably the bad decision that led to the pick-six, and the overthrow to the open Dustin Keller in the endzone. And Sanchez rarely has great games in the regular season, which is troubling.
But he also got crushed on nearly every single pass play. Wayne Hunter looked like roadkill under Von Miller’s tires, and the more heralded members of the Jets’ line did Sanchez few favors against the Broncos’ pass rush. And it didn’t help the pass game that the Jets, behind that line, didn’t muster much on the ground.
To the Jets’ credit, they were playing on three days’ rest at Mile High altitude — a fact that will get overlooked in discussions of the way the Gang Green defense folded up on the Broncos’ final drive after dominating most of the game, while pundits instead euphemize the various ways they’d like to shotgun Tim Tebow’s magical wishbone.
Many already seem to be writing requiems for the Jets’ playoff hopes, which seems premature. Certainly they appear somewhere between long and unlikely now, with the team sitting at 5-5 and playing an uninspiring brand of impotent football, but don’t forget that the team has been written off before. Like, you know, last year.
I’m certainly not going to bet on a playoff run now, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t spend time after last night’s game plugging Georgetown basketball games into my DVR and preparing a shift in mental focus. But I’ll write these Jets off for good when these Jets are officially written off for good.
The other thing — and the main thing I meant to write about this morning — is how frustrating it has become to watch NFL football in any sort of large group setting, be it at the stadium, at a bar, or even just following along on Twitter. Maybe these are the sad pleas of a pathetic former high-school player or just an embittered Jets fan lashing out, but I can’t help but think — as I’ve noted before — our nationwide fixation with fantasy football has oozed too far into our sport-fan consciousness, to the extent that you watch the game half-expecting the color commentators to start comparing the teams’ flex guys and RB2s.
Which is to say that no matter what Twitter or the guy at the bar or the dude in Row 23 in Section 336 has to say, I never find a close but low-scoring football game boring, no matter how sloppily the offenses appear to be playing. It’s football — there are 22 guys on the field all the time, nearly all of whom factor into the outcomes of every single play. Even if no one on the field is helping your fantasy team rack up points, it’s a safe bet a lot of them are playing damned well.
Whatever. Whatever, whatever. I write this also as the owner of a miserable fantasy team full of chumps and suckers and injured chump-suckers, and one that had a verbal agreement on a Darren McFadden for Aaron Rodgers deal at precisely the right moment before the other guy backed out and McFadden got hurt and left the Inevitable Victors in shambles.
Everything sucks right now, is all. The troll in me almost wants to like Tim Tebow just to be different. Reason wins out though.
How ’bout them Hoyas?