NY Jets #65 - Part 2

The other day somebody asked me that Proustian question: what is the lowest form of human misery? I answered quickly: regret. There are better choices, but regret possesses an addictive mixture of pleasure and pain. We regret the love affair we let go of, the one we never had, the life we could have had, all the while knowing that these alternate existences about which we are wondering will only serve to intensify our present misery that much more, though we'll also never know what kind of misery an alternate life would have brought us.

I'm referring of course to the NFL draft - that string of long-lost love affairs that Jets fans know very, very well. Someday I'm going to assemble the kind of football team the Jets could have had over the years if only they had made all the right choices in the draft. It would be both horrifying and ridiculous to contemplate, and therefore perfect for the Internet.

Jimmie Jones #65 has a rare distinction in that he was drafted in 1969, the only year the Jets were champions of professional football. He was linebacker who came to us in the sixth round.

There were two other linebackers who were available in the second round that the Jets could have picked up - the great Bill Bergey and Hall of Famer Ted Hendricks. They chose offensive lineman Dave Foley in the first round (a good choice overall) and quarterback Al Woodall from Duke in the second round. They had no pick in the third, but then look at who was available in the fourth - Bob Kuechenberg and John Zook. There was not a single player in the fifth, sixth, and seventh rounds who made more than an average distinction as a pro in the game (including Jimmie Jones, who played for the Jets from 1969-70 and then three seasons for the Redskins) but then, amazingly, two players picked one after the other in the eighth round were legends of the 70's - Larry Brown and James Harris. Missing out on Larry Brown was OK, as the Jets were fine at running back, and John Riggins would come in the first round two years later, but imagine James Harris taking over for Namath when he was injured throughout the early 70's and not, say, a rookie quarterback out of Duke? Most incredible is LC Greenwood, sitting all alone in the tenth round, waiting for the day that he'll be wearing those yellow shoes.

For himself, Jones grew up in South Carolina but went to Wichita State. A year after being drafted, his alma mater's football team was nearly decimated by a plane crash in Colorado that killed 31 players and staff members. Jimmie Jones must have known or been familiar with the players on that plane. Remarkably enough, the shattered remains of the plane and the wreckage the crash created around the mountain are still visible today. An SI article in 1970 on the crash some weeks afterwards indicated that pilot error was the cause but so too were decisions Wichita State made regarding the contracting of outdated planes for their team's travel. It paints a picture of what real regret looks like. It's remarkable to think that only weeks later the same thing would happen to the famous Marshall team of that season, and with greater casualties.

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Brandon Moore #65

For lesser casualties, there is Brandon Moore #65 whose career is an illustration of the simple truth that hard work, dedication, consistency, and skill will be punished by one brief moment of calamity that is in no way your fault and that can be watched again and again on YouTube and put to the music of the Benny Hill Show, at least until such time as the grid goes down, the Cloud is destroyed, civilization in the digital age collapses, and the sun turns black. I speak, of course, of the Buttfumble.

I come to praise Brandon Moore and to symbolically bury the Thanksgiving Buttfumble, certainly for his sake. For though people will come to games at the Meadowlands next year with #6 jerseys bearing the name "Buttfumble," Brandon Moore goes through his days trying to forget that his is the butt they're talking about. It's not as if his butt was pushed into the way of Mark Sanchez as he was furiously looking around for an open receiver. Like a child running from a house fire, Sanchez sprinted ahead without looking, and he collided with an offensive lineman just trying to hold his ground, which more often than not, even in last year's terrible season, is what Brandon Moore did. Anyway, for those of you still in need of yet another depiction of this metaphor for 2012 season, for our relationship to the Patriots, for perhaps our entire history as a franchise, I can direct you to my favorite, put to cartoon music; if you ask me, it's better than the Benny Hill version.

As of this writing, Brandon Moore was released by the Jets after 11 seasons of playing consistently week in and out. He is still not picked up by anyone, but surely he will be over the next few weeks. As he has graciously acknowledged in interviews, he was initially undrafted, was then forced to change positions from defense to offense, and was released by the Jets once before and then picked up again back in 2009. Luck and hard work have made his career, and usually people who emphasize the former without harping on the latter are well respected by their teammates, and that's what Brandon Moore has been. He will be missed.

Back in May, Adam Waksman for Bleacher Report made a good argument for bringing Moore back. Moore is in his early 30's, and certainly for the Jets remaking what was a low performing offensive line is important. I have thrown away my supposed expertise about the team. I don't know what they should do. But someone should pick up Brandon Moore. Two things Rex Ryan said about Moore in the BR link above (from 2012 training camp, obviously; Ryan's thinner, Moore's mentioning Tebow with a vague hopefulness) stand out - first, he says he's been insisting "ever since I got here that he's the best guard in football." We know Ryan proclaims his people's skills hyperbolically, but I agree that traditionally Moore has been that good at his position, and I'm not just being sentimental. Not just.

The other thing he mentions is that Moore is a "self-made" player, referring again to Moore's having to change from one side of the ball to the other and then mastering the new position. Much as we love the skill players who were apparently born to play their position - Adrian Peterson, Tom Brady, Lawrence Taylor, Darrelle Revis - there's a lot to be said for a player that learns a new position as a rookie while learning to play pro ball as a whole.

And the longer I spend on this ship-in-a-bottle of a blog, the more I admire the offensive linemen, the silent warriors of this very unkind game. If I had an adolescent daughter, and she insisted that she absolutely had to date a football player, I would a) seriously wonder where I went wrong as a parent and b) recommend that she date with an offensive lineman, and hope for the best. They are the steady, dedicated characters of the game, the ones who are forced to live with the knowledge that it's their butt in question, yet they're also the ones with humility enough to handle that uncomfortable truth. I don't have any of my usual lamely rueful observations about how the winds of time are cruel to the body and mind of the football player. After 11 seasons, I'm just sad to see Brandon Moore go.

NY Jets #6 - Part 2 (cont'd)

 

We are in the process of updating all previously discussed numbers up to 61. We are also revising some of the previous entries themselves, making them, we hope, more palatable. More readable. Less unreadable.

How things change. Only last year, I was bemoaning the moral lapses in Mark Sanchez #6 when he was associating with a 17 year-old, either romantically or socially. Now I see that my rather heavy-handed lecture from a year ago was not even worth the time reading. Now I seem to have found more important considerations - that he is not a great quarterback and, quite possibly, not even a good one.

Jets fans have been debating internally and externally about the possibility of picking up yet another over-the-hill quarterback like Peyton Manning ever since the season ended, and it's absurd. Nothing good comes from bringing old veterans to our team, and I'm certain that Manning is not considering the possibility himself. Sanchez is, according to some reports, not a serious leader of the offense, and he apparently lacks a work ethic. I don't know. This culture of "corruption" of which Sanchez's backup spoke at season's end is such a cauldron of poor planning and bombast, and the problem is neither Sanchez nor his unhappy former co-captain Santonio Holmes. The problem is that Rex Ryan is a very good defensive coordinator but not a great Head Coach and is almost completely devoid of offensive vision.

But you know, outside of that, the Jets are actually still not that bad a team, and Mark Sanchez, if he can improve even vaguely, might yet lead the offense to the playoffs again. That might seem like a bold statement considering how deeply felt everyone's funeral songs were for the Jets' future at season's end.

But Mark Sanchez is close to being a good quarterback, if not a great one. His statistics show a QB whose rating has incrementally improved in three years. He threw 26 touchdowns in 2011, which was an improvement, though against 18 interceptions, which was at least two less than he threw his first year. His passing yardage has increased each year. One of the most telling pieces of information is that he was fifth in the NFL this year in being sacked (39 times). That was a steady growth from the season before, and we all knew how bad the Jets front line was this season as early as the Ravens' game. Take with this that Sanchez was saddled with the underperforming Brian Shottenheimer offense, and you can actually argue that the problem is not his alone.

But he isn't on any lists of top statistical performances from last year. In overall stats, Ryan Fitzpatrick had a better season than he, and so did Carson Palmer, technically. I admit I actually believed he'd throw for 4,000 yards this season, so I'm as ridiculous as anyone else who, conversely, thinks that the only answer is Peyton Manning. I don't see how things can get markedly better for the Jets' offense, even with Tony Sporano as offensive coordinator, and the team has made personnel decisions that are just terrible. So what real good will a modest improvement in Sanchez's performance really bring, anyway?

Maybe he still might be a good quarterback, or even a very good one, but it will be if only the gods will be kinder to our club next year. Of course, I don't recall many instances where the gods have been so generous with us over the years since Super Bowl III, and perhaps they are only now reminding us that the confident, almost oblivious young Californian who took the field to lead the Jets over the Patriots in the playoffs more than a year ago should have counted his blessings while he still had them going his way.

NY Jets #6 - Part 2

Until recently, the most important #6 in New York Jets history was Ray Lucas, and for half a season - the ill-fated one in 1999 - he was the Jets' starter. He was the greatest overachiever at a position that is traditionally mixed with promise, hope, misery and disappointment for the Jets. When all of us had so many big dreams for that season, starting quarterback Vinny Testaverde went down in the opener with a snapped Achilles tendon, and there was literally no one ready to take his place. You can blame Bill Parcells for both those situations. Right before the season opener, he ordered the grass they were planning to use be replaced by an artificial turf that caught Vinny's foot in the hot sun and helped snap his tendon. You can blame Parcells for not having any decent backup. I still do.

By the bye week, the leaderless Jets played themselves out of the playoffs. But then Ray Lucas took over and lead the Jets to a .500 finish. Parcells called it (at the time) his finest achievement in coaching. I prefer to thank Ray Lucas. He became a Dolphin in 2000 and then fell off the high wire, but for eight games in 1999, Ray Lucas was one of the the most successful QB's in the AFC. Today, if I wanted to say anything bad about Mark Sanchez (and it's going to be a half-hearted effort below to do so, let me say) then I would wear Ray Lucas' jersey to a Jets game.

Joe Prokop #6 is found in many of longtime Jets' placekicker Pat Leahy's best photographs because Prokop was the holder on Leahy's kicks during the 1990 season, the year Leahy was voted team MVP. Prokop was also the Jets' punter from 1988-90. He would be our Booth Lustig Award winner if not for a man named Bubby Brister. That's distinction in the world of the Gang Green for you. But on one very dull afternoon in another one of Bruce Coslet's (er, Joe Walton) unfortunate seasons (1989) Joe Prokop apparently took the ball at the snap of a Pat Leahy field goal and ran it in for a 17 yard touchdown in a losing effort against the Patriots. This must have been the design of the play. The well-traveled handler and punter was given his moment, and he took it. Life is worth living for a host of reasons that may seem mundane to anyone not looking very closely, the way one never really notices the man holding the ball for the placekicker. Doing your job well and dependably is its own reward, and I hope I don't sound too much like a high school teacher when I say that such things make life worth living. But who in the world would sneeze at the chance to run it past the point of things as they are? Who wouldn't consider such an opportunity even more worthwhile?

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Sometimes I make mistakes. Sometimes I make dumb mistakes. In this case, I called Reggie Hodges #6 "Russell" Hodges in my last update and was properly corrected by davidill (as seen below). Now that I have failed to even so much as get his name right, I owe it to this man to paraphrase the very best of the mere tip of the iceberg that the web invariably offers - and who knows, maybe even more. How could I have lost the opportunity to talk about this man? Where to begin?

1) You can follow him on Twitter, and when you do, you will see a man who is happy with life, or at least happy in the way that Twitter presents all of us, in 140 characters or less. Reggie exists in a spectrum of experience by which I am fascinated. He believes in Jesus as an active, living presence in his life. I grew up Roman Catholic, and though there are many ways of believing in Christianity as a Catholic, I confess I never wrote or thought about Jesus in quite the way that a believer like Reggie Hodges does. I often wished that I could as a child, but always He seemed distant and mysterious, talking of love and the end of time all on the same page. Thinking about Jesus truly appears to make him happy (Twitter happy, maybe, but I believe it's the real thing in this case). For me, as a Catholic, Jesus always reminded me (without meaning to, no doubt) of my deep limitations as a human being (Jesus wouldn't have called Reggie Russell, for example, nor vice versa). He was always an example of what we should try to imitate, and He still is. There are people who talk about a personal relationship with Him. I know they're not crazy, but that's not what I have felt. My loss, I guess.

But theology classes never helped cure my sense of alienation from Him. Never mind how extraordinarily diverse the character of Jesus is when you start looking at Him historically. Read Bart Ehrman on the subject (Misquoting Jesus, Apocalyptic Prophet) and you are shaken. Jesus has been many things to many people throughout time, but who he actually was historically is a subject of debate. Who He is to a believer like Reggie Hodges, a person of faith, is a matter entirely different. To Hodges, He is as real now as He was then. Hodges says, "I am a servant of God disguised as a punter." That's real stuff. I have always felt that the disguise I wear is just one that sits over another and another and another, to the point where who I am depends on whom I'm talking to. I suppose that this is often what life is like. I always imagine people like Reggie Hodges to be exactly who they say they are to every person to whom they speak, and I suppose that they may be happier than I.

2) There is something poignant to the punter's life. Unless he's Ray Guy, the punter going to be shuttled around as needed. He is not a glorified personage. His #6 is not as desired as, say, Mark Sanchez's. In six seasons, Hodges has officially played for eight teams, though he is signed with the Browns through 2012. His player's biography resembles that of a picaresque's nomadic hero. The Jets signed him when Ben Graham's punts kept falling short and sent him off the following spring. Signed by the Titans the following Fall, he was cut a month later. And though he didn't do it as a Jet, Hodges did something that ranks as a remarkable act among punters. He took a fake for 68 yards, the longest run for a punter in NFL history, and - if it is to be believed - the longest run from scrimmage for the Browns all through the 2010 season. And there you are. God works in mysterious ways.

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I remember sitting at a wedding once next to an older woman who claimed that she had spent some time in her early 20's in Miami during the weeks leading up to Super Bowl III with Joe Namath. She never said in what capacity this time was spent. When you read about Namath's record of liaisons in Mark Kriegal's biography, it is remarkable. Any man who dated Suzy Storm alone is a star. He had poise.

Mark Sanchez #6 might someday get his own entry on our gloriously unread blog. At first, the funniest part of Mark Sanchez's fame was his overstated attribute of "poise." Deadspin used Sanchez as a poster boy for sports media's absolute dearth of original thought in its profligate use of the word. Because poise was all we were looking for in him, our expectations of his rookie year at the starting position were minimal. What else could we expect from a young, overpaid underwear model? Neil O'Donnell had poise, too, and it didn't do us much good, but he was an old man by football's standards when he was a Jet.

What we've discovered is that Mark Sanchez is intelligent on the field, with a manner of being that is Namath incarnate, the manner of champions who use their own self-confidence to deflect away the fear of failure. I suppose that's what poise is, isn't it? He played like Namath in his first season because he threw more interceptions than touchdowns, though made very good decisions in the postseason in January 2010 which did not involve red, green, and yellow colors on his sleeve, or even handing off to Shonn Greene.

Then in 2010, his numbers improved. He reversed his touchdown to interception ratio, with a QB rating that moved from 63.0 to 75.3. The Jets did their December dive, but they rebounded. When they took the field against the seemingly unbeatable Patriots in Foxboro, I noticed that Sanchez ran out of the tunnel with a calm, blinding confidence in his own happiness that Colisseum spectators must surely have seen in an occasional defenseless Christian who was about to be fed to the beasts. I suppose I would have still remembered that expression even if the Jets had lost. But they didn't. He is our quarterback.

But in case you haven't noticed, people in the field of athletics are twisted. They post very easily found videos about their wives' feet. They father children with different women with the speed of Genghis Khan. They accidentally shoot themselves. They also rape women in the bathrooms of bars, or possibly (well, "possibly" in Sanchez's case) even on college campuses. They send photographs of their penises to women who give them only the vaguest sign of professional interest. Then it all ends up on Deadspin.

Mark Sanchez's possibly/possibly not heated romantic relationship with a 17 year-old fits somewhat squarely into this paradigm - one that befits a person who has grown up believing, through community and educational reinforcement, that he is above the moral law. When people have razzed me about Sanchez's rendezvous with Eliza Kruger, I have caught myself nearly saying the same thing that Eliza said to Mark about her being legal in New York. How can I possibly defend it? I cannot. I certainly know the difference between an adolescent and an adult, but a 24 year-old man should, too. It's not exactly trapping a woman in a bathroom, but it's still morally wrong.

And what's remarkable is that, like Joe Namath in his time, Mark Sanchez could have any woman in any borough of America's largest and most culturally diverse city. But instead he texted a 17 year-old girl from Connecticut. This is also an aspect of the successful athlete's experience. His pampered life cloisters him from the real experiences of failure and success that the rest of us had to have with romance. Apparently the key to a great athlete's psychological growth is his ability to "forgive" himself when he fails on the field. I'm not always so sure that such failures are acceptable off it. This isn't a rationalization, but it is a psychological explanation for why men who take the field against an unbeatable team with the smile of a winner can also appear completely unable to grasp that a sober, intelligent grown woman might be interest in him for something other than his own vanity.

More likely, Mark Sanchez was not interested in conversation, but in exactly the kind of ephemeral, superficial adoration that a 17 year-old girl bestows on the high school's hottest football player. One senses that he needs to join the adult world, not just as an athlete, but as a human being.

The Bright Side of Things, Really

Well, it's time to update, isn't it? Whatever any of our expectations were of this season, a second round appearance in the playoffs is the very outside edge of my own definition of success. I love that we "backed" into the playoffs. Let freedom ring. I love that Rex Ryan swings into bipolar moods of euphoria and ponderous disappointment. I am glad that I am forced to feel shame and self-criticism every time Shonn Greene plays to his potential and well beyond my recent criticism of him as a washout. I was wrong in every way. God Bless My Stupidity.

And while we're at it, let's take a moment to praise the New York Jets for drafting well over the past five years, something that I don't think the franchise has ever done over such a span: David Harris, D'Brickashaw Ferguson, Kerry Rhodes, Nick Mangold, Brad Smith, Leon Washington, Drew Coleman, Dustin Keller, Dwight Lowery, and of course, Darrelle Revis. Oh, and Mark Sanchez. And Shonn Greene, provided that neither man is responsible for more than two turnovers each in San Diego on Sunday evening.

Listen to me. There I go again.

And while we're at it, I want to thank everyone who made this possible. I don't think we have a chance this weekend. Our last outing here last year was disastrous. But I have to go to bed. It;s going to be a long weekend.