Say what you will about booing the home team, the Jets deserved everything they heard on Sunday.

I’ve always embraced booing as a simple and effective way to express emotion in large crowds. I know some fans think it’s only appropriate to boo their own teams if the team shows a lack of effort, and undoubtedly the Jets were trying on Sunday. Sort of.

But lifeless, unfocused play merits booing too, and there was plenty of that. Boo Mark Sanchez — hard as that is for me to say — for forgetting that Sean Smith was a Dolphins defensive back and not a Jets receiver. Boo the offensive line for not giving Sanchez much time. Boo Rex Ryan for failing to have his team prepared to bounce back after a miserable loss. Boo Brian Schottenheimer for entirely abandoning the run.

About that: It’s true that the Jets weren’t running the ball effectively. But they also weren’t passing the ball effectively, and the Dolphins never had a big enough lead to force the Jets to pass to play catch-up. It was a sloppy day and the ball was wet and everything else, but those conditions are bad for both rushing and passing.

And it seemed like every run play the Jets called was a counter or a draw that took hours to develop. I’m no offensive genius, but when you’ve got a purportedly great line and a couple of purportedly great fullbacks and nothing else is working, seems like you might want to go back to the basics.

The only thing boo-worthy about the Jets’ defense was that they once again failed to have the appropriate number of players on the field in their goal-line package and had to burn a timeout. How many times can that happen?

But it’s an accomplishment for the defense to hold an NFL team to 10 points, even in crappy conditions, when the team is given good field position again and again. And tons of credit should go to Dolphins punter Brandon Fields. How many times the Jets wind up just outside field-goal range on fourth down? If Fields didn’t average 56.4 yards on 10 punts, the Jets probably would have been able to scrap their way to a victory despite the lack of offense.

It’s only one game, coming off another only one game. The Jets sit at 9-4 in a conference that will probably only require 10 wins for the playoffs. So barring a downright Mets-ian collapse, they’ll probably still get in. And once the playoffs start, as we saw last year, it’s at least partly a crapshoot or — more accurately — a contest of which team picks the right time to play its best football.

Forget any of the best-team-in-football talk, though. That was shot after Monday, and should now be buried deep beneath the Meadowlands with Jimmy Hoffa. Certainly, the Jets have the talent and capacity to play like the best team in football for a stretch, but I suspect the same is true of many teams and this one swayed us only by doing so early in the season.

The small, pathetic upside for Jets fans is that the team doesn’t appear to benefit at all from home-field advantage, so a slate of road playoff games might not be the worst thing.

Ryan had already set these gasbags off last week, offending their sensitive souls, when he had the onions to compare his team’s “Monday Night Football” defeat to the Bears’ 38-24 “MNF” loss to Miami in 1985. Such blasphemy. How dare Ryan compare his team to the ’85 Bears, his critics raged.

First, they should all calm down. Then they should take their own advice and shut up.

Where is their imagination – and sense of humor? More importantly, do those clearly encouraging Ryan to channel his inner Mangini get it? If Ryan ever attaches a filter to his mouth, a quote-gushing machine suddenly goes dry. If he tones it down he would also be telling his team he’s a two-bit phony.

– Bob Raissman, N.Y. Daily News.

Here, Raissman pretty much nails the great N.Y. media paradox. An athlete or coach keeps quiet and he’s deemed aloof or incoherent or otherwise scorned for his inability to create good copy. An athlete or coach speaks up and says interesting things and eventually his words are thrown back in his face.

The good news is it doesn’t really matter at all. When the Jets are winning, Jets fans will love Ryan. When they’re losing, fans will question him. The N.Y. media in this equation is essentially Samneric, operating in lockstep, drifting with the tide.

I don’t have much to say about last night’s Jets-Patriots bloodbath except that it sucked. It sucked to watch, it probably sucked to play, and it especially sucked that I sat there pathetically holding out hope that the Jets could pull off some miracle comeback, up until the point where their defense stopped bothering. The broadcast sucked, the coaching sucked, Tom Brady’s stupid hair sucked.

It all sucked, except possibly Santonio Holmes and my buffalo wings.

All I can offer to Jets fans is that it’s only one game. And as much as it feels like the wind has been knocked out of the team — nay, it feels like their ribs have been broken and have punctured their lungs — it ultimately counts for one game in the standings.

Yes, it makes their path to taking the division and a first-round bye more difficult, but hardly impossible. The fact that we’re even hoping for playoff byes and home-field advantage at this point in the season speaks to how far the Jets have come in the last couple years.

F@#$. Whatever. Whatever, whatever. Tom Brady wears man-UGGs.

Sad Mark Sanchez: