Ryan and his staff have altered the way people look at the Jets and given the team an unexpected marketing boost as they move into the New Meadowlands Stadium, where the Jets will have a new identity even though they will still share quarters with the Giants. For the Jets, the promotional dividends produced by “Hard Knocks” have not been countered by a disastrous injury. The worst that happened was Ryan’s mother (and Tony Dungy) expressing consternation about the coach’s profanity.
And like a good cliffhanger, the hero of the tale, Revis, returned just in time to end the series.
– Richard Sandomir, N.Y. Times.
I’ve neglected the Jets for the last couple weeks here because, honestly, I find preseason football awful and the hype around it difficult to bear. It’s meaningless. Teams show very little in the preseason and the starters hardly play.
But I probably should have mentioned the Revis thing, which is legitimately huge. For no particular reason, I felt confident from the start that the Jets and Revis would get something hammered out, then grew nervous thanks to Hard Knocks and the media blackout.
Anyway, now football season is starting. It’s starting! Football season! Hooray!
Before that happens, two final thoughts about Hard Knocks upon its finale last night:
• Everything they aired only served to confirm/strengthen my feelings about Mark Sanchez. Clearly he’s hilarious and awesome and willing to wear Taco Bell hats. What a hero. It only helps that I think he might actually turn into a decent quarterback.
I also like the idea of having him call the offense for the last preseason game. Then I thought it was particularly interesting or funny, or something, that he called that little slip-out pass on the goal line for the touchdown. That’s a Madden play. It’s a good call, no doubt, and it worked, but that’s one of those unstoppable Madden plays.
And it struck me that Sanchez’s generation — hell, my generation — is now growing up and coming of age and impacting professional football, and we all came up playing that game.
Madden’s not exactly like real football, obviously, but it’s not a terrible simulation either — and it gets more accurate all the time. And it encourages players to watch and interact with the game in a way they never would have if they were just playing it then tracking themselves on film in some dark room the following Monday with the coach yelling at them.
And so I wonder how the game will continue to change as a generation of players who grew up not just playing the game, but coaching and play-calling and strategizing in a decently accurate simulation year-round, comes of age.
• I could do without ever seeing Mike Tannenbaum on camera again. I know Hard Knocks is reality TV and the idea is that they’re all supposed to be behaving the way they would if the cameras weren’t there, but there’s no way you could convince me that everyone involved wasn’t conscious of the cameras throughout.
Rex Ryan and Mike Westhoff were really good at playing themselves, it seemed, but Tannenbaum’s performance seemed the most forced, like he was overacting the role of exasperated football GM.
Plus it just didn’t sit right with me that they filmed guys getting cut. That’s a major life event. If I’m a 23-year-old kid trying to make it in the NFL, there’s absolutely no way I want that documented and broadcast to a million homes or whatever.
Tedquarters 