If the Jets lose this week, I will be a very sad man.

Here’s me on the phone with Brian Bassett to discuss:

C’mon, that’s an impressive “wounds” segue there.

If you check back here often, you’ve probably noticed the new photo of the back of my head and a portion of my desk on Twitter. The photo is courtesy of Matt Cerrone, and stemmed from a discussion we had over precisely what niche I was aiming to fill in an already-crowded blogosphere.

In short, I have none. Maybe I’ll figure that out in time. I enjoy writing a column on SNY.tv and will continue to do so, but my priorities at work don’t always allow the type of time required to hash out a full-length column.

So that’s what the photo is about. Because of my job, I spend a lot of time sitting at my desk and thinking about sports. So the photo in the header is what the back of my head looks like when I sit at my desk and think about sports.

And this blog, I suppose, is what the inside of my head looks like when I sit at my desk and think about sports. It’s a home for my scatterbrained drivel, and I sense Matt was eager to help with it at least partly because it means that same drivel won’t be yelled at him from across this office while he’s trying to get work done.

This is also a place to aggregate some of the video stuff I do, mostly so my parents and wife will know where to find it. So here’s what the front of my head looks like when I sit at someone else’s desk and talk about sports:

OK, everyone’s going to pile on Mark Sanchez for his crappy performance in that miserable, awful Jets game. And they should, he threw five interceptions.

But it’s not like he was getting much help from Dustin Keller. Honestly, that was just a brutal, brutal performance from the tight end. How many catchable passes did he not catch? And how poorly timed was that offsides penalty?

And Rex Ryan? Not such a good job, either. First off, someone’s got to take the blame when the team makes 14 penalties for 96 yards, and it might as well be the head coach. Also, using up a timeout for a bad challenge to gain like 10 yards? Awesome move, dude. I know it didn’t end up mattering, but c’mon.

How about that Jets’ run defense? All offseason we heard all about how hard-hitting Gang Green would be this year, and for a while, it appeared to be true. Then it turned out that the only people they were hitting hard were defenseless receivers and quarterbacks who had already thrown the ball. Maybe try actually tackling, guys. I don’t know. Maybe that’s not in Rex Ryan’s lauded defensive scheme.

Lito Sheppard got burnt up like Ricky Williams on multiple occasions. Not in the fun way, either.

Basically the only people who shouldn’t take heat for this one are Darrelle Revis, who’s great (despite the holding calls), Thomas Jones, and the Jets’ offensive line, who gave Sanchez enough time to make some downright Favrey decisions.

Do you know how bad the Bills are? The Bills are terrible. The Bills were trying to lose that game; the Jets just wanted it more.

I’m not willing to call this season over or say “same old Jets” just yet, because the team looked awesome in its three wins and I’ve got to assume there’s some sort of learning curve for a rookie head coach and a rookie quarterback. This one was awful, though.

Oh, but the game’s Least Valuable Player award has to go to Dick Enberg. I’m sorry, dude, how is it that you can’t pronounce Sanchez? Have you not heard this surname like a million times by now? And please, could you tell me one more time about if Mark Sanchez has ever played in cold weather before? I’m just not sure I got it the first seven times.

I’m sick of that storyline already and it hasn’t even hit the papers or talk-radio yet. But it’s coming soon, I’m certain. I can’t wait.

Maybe, just maybe this kicks the team in the jocks and they wake up to shut some people up. But that Kris Jenkins injury is terrible. If he’s out, Rex Ryan’s going to have to suit up himself to jam up the interior, and based on his performance tonight I’m not sure that’s ag ood idea.

And that beautiful young rookie quarterback is now working against public perception, maybe for the first time in his life.

Destiny is calling, Mark Sanchez. Will you accept the charges?

Yesterday, I got on the horn with Brian Bassett from The Jets Blog to preview the Bills and Jets.

Essentially, if the Jets lose this one, they’re not nearly as good as I thought they were after the first quarter of Week 1, when I — normally a huge skeptic when it comes to the Jets — announced to my wife that they were Super Bowl-bound.

The Bills are terrible. Watching Eric Mangini and Dick Jauron match wits in last week’s Browns-Bills matchup was like watching a chess match between, well, between Eric Mangini and Dick Jauron. It might have been the worst football game I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a ton of really, really bad football games.

Did you know that in ten years, from pee-wee to high-school football, I played on a total of one winning team? And yet every single one of those terrible, terrible clubs executed better and protected the quarterback more successfully than the Bills and Browns.

Someone, I forget who, said on Twitter that it was setting football back 50 years. I don’t think that’s appropriate. It wasn’t football. It was like some new sport where someone just threw 22 random huge dudes out on a field and watched to see what happens. It’s called Ham!Smash! and Eric Mangini is its greatest mind and motivator.

Anyway, here’s the video. J-E-T-S.

According to the Daily News, Rex Ryan held a closed-door meeting with his defense that Kerry Rhodes deemed “PG-13.”

The good news is the rating means Ryan almost certainly didn’t take his shirt off.

But seriously, this type of thing is pretty run-of-the-mill in football, it seems. A coach gets angry and lights into his players in a profanity-laced rant, because that’s what football coaches do.

And so it always makes me think of the Tony Bernazard situation, in which he apparently tore his shirt off and challenged everyone on the Mets’ Double-A team to a fight.

I mean, as I’ve said before, that’s pretty crazy. And it’s almost certainly not the Assistant General Manager’s job. But is it as big a deal as the Daily News made it out to be?

I don’t know. I know that it always seemed like everyone wanted to either expose or target Bernazard as the problem in the Mets’ organization, and I have no reason to believe that wasn’t the case. But I’ll point out again that the Mets didn’t immediately turn their season around on the back of a unified clubhouse after Bernazard got canned.

My suspicion — and this is pure speculation — is that Bernazard is something of a jerk that rubbed the beat reporters the wrong way, and Rubin found the first opportunity he could justify to expose Bernazard for it. And he picked a pretty hilarious one, and did a good job with the details.

Part of the difference between what Ryan did and what Bernazard did, I suppose, is that Ryan was taking on grown men with giant salaries while Bernazard was essentially scolding a group of 21- and 22-year-olds.

Still, I used to do some stuff as a JV football coach that almost certainly should’ve gotten me fired. I would line up at cornerback — without pads, mind you — and play bump-and-run to knock receivers to the ground. And I’d play quarterback on the scout team, then lower my shoulder and steamroll the kids dumb enough to try to tackle me.

In retrospect it seems pretty violent and unnecessary, but I still like to think and hope I was making them better at football. And most of them seemed to still like me.

I guess I’m saying that, in isolation, many things a coach could do to motivate or better his players might seem a little bit over the line. But in context, what Bernazard did might not have been quite as insane as we now assume it to be.

I’m a sucker for offensive line play, so I figured I’d point this out here at halftime of the Jets-Dolphins game. D’Brickashaw Montgomery Ladarius Fantana Ferguson, as he’s known, is having an awesome game.

I’m pretty certain he’s only missed one block all day when he couldn’t catch up with a Dolphins cornerback on a wide receiver screen. He also got called for holding once, but he’s been primarily in one-on-one assignments on the Dolphins d-ends and he’s completely neutralizing them. Pay attention if you’re watching, it’s cool.

A couple of times, on run plays, he has driven his man 5-10 yards downfield. And a lot of the Jets’ running yards have come right off his hip.

I was one of legions of Jets fans who wanted the team to pick someone at a more exciting position when they took Ferguson, and I was unimpressed with his play in his first couple of seasons. I thought it was a bit ridiculous when he talked about making the Pro Bowl in the preseason this year, but if he plays like this all season he should be All-Pro.

If I remembered we were going to do this video Jets preview with Brian Bassett of The Jets Blog, I might have shaved or not worn the orange sweater my mom gave me.

But whatever, it’s not about me or my sweater, it’s about Bassett and all the interesting things he has to say about Gang Green.

I love football. One of the main reasons I started this blog was to be able to write about football. Technically, I think I might actually know more about football than I do about baseball, as I played football for 10 years and coached in on the JV level (one of the most fun things I’ve ever done, for what it’s worth).

But I find writing about football much more difficult than baseball. With baseball, as you may have recognized by now, I like to write confidently about that which can be quantified and skeptically about that which cannot.

In football, I’m not certain anything can be quantified. We can easily determine whether a single hitter or pitcher is good because ultimately there are many, many times in a baseball season in which he has the opportunity to perform independent of his teammates.

No such situation ever exists in football, which is a big part about why I like football. It is the ultimate team sport, and the sport in which coaching — and coaching decisions — matter the most.

We can — and sometimes I do — examine game footage and watch tons of replays and try to determine the good players and the less-than-good players, but the process is so subjective that it’s impossible to tell whether our own biases are affecting our analysis.

I might look at a trap play and note that the guard made a good block on the opposite defensive tackle, but the runningback simply missed the seam. Someone else might look at the same play and see how the defensive tackle stood up that guard, plugging the hole the back was aiming for.

There have recently been leaps forward in the realm of advanced stats in the NFL, but as far as I know, there is still no way to assess any individual player in isolation. We can determine whether a runningback has been good or bad, but it will always have depended on, at least in part, the success of his line and his team’s ability to stretch the field, pulling defenders out of the box.

And of course a lot of that falls on the coaches, who are charged with making sure everyone on the field knows his assignment and executes it.

So it’s difficult to definitively know anything in football. I think Eli Manning used to suck and is now more or less awesome. I’d guess Laveranues Coles was underrated in his time with the Jets.

I’m certain that Mark Sanchez is handsome, and I suspect he’s actually pretty damn good at football. But he really, really needs to tuck the ball in while he’s running.

In short, football requires a whole lot more guesswork and faith than baseball, and while I’m prepared to attempt that here, you have the right to be skeptical. But know that any football analysis or opinion I provide is rooted in that same skepticism, and is only my honest attempt to in some way quantify a completely unquantifiable game.

I’m a Jets fan, for what it’s worth, but I like the Giants, too. I strongly, strongly dislike Brett Favre, and I have since way before it was popular. I think ball control is immensely important, and I think the term “ball control” is funny.

And I’m certain that this is one of the funniest pictures ever taken: