NY Jets #57 - Part 2

Mo Lewis #57 (ranked #142)

To give Mo Lewis #57 a tribute higher than simply being the man who inadvertently changed the modern game of football with a single devastating hit on Drew Bledsoe, I think it's important to mention something which should both elevate Lewis to a place of genuine respect and also shed light on a sad truth about the way the franchise has played defense over the past 51 years.

Pro-football-reference.com offers a comprehensive list of the 1000 best players on offense and on defense using the Elo system, "a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in two-player games" based on the calculation system for chess ratings made by Arpad Elo. I don't claim to understand it, except that the list is a set of matches, one player against another statistically, in order to determine who is better than whom. The overall list puts Jerry Rice as the best overall offensive player who won the most statistical matchups out of 720 possible players, and Reggie White as the overall best defensive player out of a possible 815. Mo Lewis is at a rather high ranking - #142. Whether any of this has any validity at all is questionable. But putting Lewis there is no fluke, especially when you take into account his high rate of tackles early in his career, forced fumbles and interceptions.

The comparably rated offensive player is Grady Alderman, the longtime Vikings lineman. Above Alderman there are eight offensive players who spent a considerable time with the Jets, notably Curtis Martin (80), Vinny Testaverde (90), Joe Namath (102), Kevin Mawae (114), John Riggins (126), Don Maynard (137), with present-day Jet LaDainian Tomlinson #21 at number 18. Not many, but what can you do? Those ratings are themselves a little absurd. I would put Martin above Riggins, but I would put Riggins above Namath. But the really striking point is that above Mo Lewis there are no Jets defensive players. No one. This point cannot be emphasized enough, and to be honest, I think this is reasonable. It is only very recently that the Jets have been considered a strong defense, though after Sunday's game against Oakland, there is reason to believe that they may be rated lower this year. The Sack Exchange ranks lower (Gastineau at 188, Klecko at 247, Lyons sadly not at all) while Larry Grantham #60 ranks just below Lewis. So there is at least one argument here that Mo Lewis is statistically the best defensive player in New York Jets history. True? False? Perhaps it was appropriate that in 2001 the "best defensive player" in our history helped create a seismic shift in the AFC, for who else could be capable of such a thing? James Farrior #51, whose best statistics have come with the Steelers? Maybe. He is ranked overall at 140.

***

Jim Jerome #57 played special teams for the Jets during the latter part of the 1977 season, when the sky was darkening on an increasingly poor season. After starting the year 2-2, the Jets dropped seven in a row before they managed to barely squeeze past the equally poor New Orleans Saints. When Jerome joined the ride, the season had long lost its momentum, and the young team had probably fallen into the ennui that infects a late failed football season. When a new player enters the locker room he must feel like the new teacher in our disgruntled faculty who tries to save her inspiration for new ideas from the veteran colleague's compulsion to stay attached to old ways, whether tried and true or not. But regardless, when you play a few hours or weeks in the NFL, you are always known as someone who played in the pros. The Watertown Daily Times of Connecticut mentions Jim Jerome as a standout for Syracuse football when their program was at a low and then as a a special teams man for an NFL team on the slide.

Whether the Jets of 1977 (3-11) were really pros in the sense that, say, the 1977 Oakland Raiders (11-3) were is hard to say. The Jets might even have done as well as 7-7 in '77 if you take into account how close the games were that season. Four losses alone were within four or fewer points. But on the last day of what appears to Jim Jerome's career, the Jets fell 27-0 to the Philadelphia Eagles, a team that managed only a 5-9 record.

***

On July 12, 1997, the Seattle Times published the following about John Little #57:

Former NFL lineman John Little died of a heart attack in Hot Coffee, Miss., earlier this week. The two-time All-Big Eight selection at Oklahoma State spent seven years in the NFL, with the New York Jets, Houston Oilers and Buffalo Bills.

Apparently he was born in Tallulah, Louisiana, but he died in Hot Coffee, as rural a community as one could possibly imagine - even rural by the definition of a rural state; according to Wikipedia: "about halfway between Jackson and Hattiesburg ... Hot Coffee isn't a quaint little town; it's not even a town. Instead it's a tiny community of farms, homes, and businesses scattered along two-lane Highway 532...According to local lore, a resident [J.J. Davis] opened an inn in 1870 and sold coffee to passersby. Apparently the drink was the only memorable thing about the place."

The "only thing." Is that all there is? Hot Coffee, Mississippi is a non-census municipality without a zip code. This is where John Little's life came to an end, far from the northern cities where he once played, distanced from suburbs, freeways or malls.

I suppose one of his last games in a uniform was playing for the Buffalo Bills, and probably against the Jets in that middling season of 1977. This was a cold, gray, poorly played December game at Shea that I listened to on the radio with my Dad as we drove around Roosevelt Field, doing Christmas errands. I remember feeling what I felt last week as the Jets fell to Oakland. They can still win. They will, won't they? Is that all there is? Dad suggested that it was. "This is why I gave the season tickets away," he said. They trailed in the fourth quarter 7-3 before Wesley Walker caught a touchdown pass from Richard Todd, raising our expectations for two wins in a row, a feat they hadn't achieved since October. And then the Bills scored, and I slumped across the back of the bench seat, staring at Dad's shoulder and then beyond it, out into the vast, flat cold slate color landscape of the Long Island Expressway. That's all there was.

***

Hubert Bobo #57 has the best name for any season. In a new magazine called Sports Illustrated in 1954, he is included in their preview of the upcoming Rose Bowl between Ohio State and USC. SI noted the formidable backfield of the Buckeyes, which included Bobo, Bobby Watkins and "Hopalong" Cassaday. Bobo had been a Ohio high school football star, and at Ohio State, he helped win a National Championship for a team that also included future Hall of Famer Jim Parker. He would then go on to play as a pro in Canada and then eventually begin a professional career in the States with the Los Angeles Chargers, and then at linebacker with the New York Titans for two seasons. His Wikipedia page thoughtfully outlines his statistics as a pro.

But at one time in our history, during Christmas season in 1954, a marvelous moment of synchronicity occurred. In that 1954 issue of SI, Hubert Bobo is mentioned as one of the keys to the Buckeyes' offense, but on page 24, a story can be found on middleweight champion Carl "Bobo" Olsen. In the midst of the holidays, readers were given a Christmas gift of two Bobos. Would that we were so lucky.

NY Jets #57 - 9/23/01

The weekend came and went. When we were not in praise and remembrance for the fallen, we were thinking about how much the country has tilted toward oblivion in the past ten years. We are a more divided country, a poorer one, an angrier one, a less important one in the eyes of the world, and yet the terrorists did not win, nor will they ever. Generations to come will wonder what we were thinking during this time, and I suppose we'll wear the same look of bemused frustration that my parents had when I asked them about living through the 60's. It was a strange time, we'll say. Stranger than usual, and it became difficult to see the difference between what was real and what was just our imagination.

I had an argument with a colleague of mine this week about whether or not it would have been better to make the memorials for the fallen in Schwenksville Shanksville and New York more of an affirmation. Why do we need to build holes in the ground to show where the towers were? he asked. Why can't we have something that reaches for the sky? I think sometimes he just enjoys a good argument. My brother narrowly escaped the World Trade Center that day and ran for his life uptown until he reached my cousin's office at Park Avenue. A colleague of mine once dated a fireman from Queens who was lost in the towers' destruction. The stepsister of a friend of mine was a flight attendant on one of the planes that hit the towers. Everyone on the east coast seemed no more than three degrees separated from someone who was witness or victim that day. Ten years later, given what little comfort we can take from our country's present state, it's appropriate that a void be the main symbol of our remembrance.

***

Two days after JFK was assassinated in 1963, my mother went out on a date with a guy to watch the football Giants play the football Cardinals at Yankee Stadium. She met him at his apartment, arriving just in time to see Lee Harvey Oswald murdered on live TV. She remembers being unable to take herself away from the networks showing it over and over, like instant replay. Her boyfriend wanted to get to the game, but she couldn't stop watching it. All the while in her mind she kept wondering, What's going on? What's happening?

Still, the game was played, and she went. So did approximately 63,000 other fans. Richard Rothschild wrote in the Chicago Tribune that he attended the game and remembers no music, no extra sound effects, no halftime bands, nothing extraneous being done and that the crowd in attendance was solemnly focused on the game, with cigarette and cigar smoke wafting everywhere in the late autumn sun. There are legendary (and possibly inaccurate stories) of the tomb-like silence of the big stadium that day, so much so that people claim they could hear the whistles clearly from the upper seats. Bob Shepperd Sheppard called for a moment of silence at the game's start.

The news of Oswald's death buzzed around the stadium. Most people who were at the game got there too early to see it happen on TV as Mom did. They missed an event that would shape their country to come - a man's murder, caught live, witnessed by millions of people who had already been stitched to their TVs in a effort to comprehend the incomprehensible. As for the Giants, they were upset by the Cardinals 24-17, playing poorly throughout. Pete Rozelle later said the Sunday games should never have been allowed to go on, though apparently he had been given permission from the Kennedy family to let them play.

In his article above, Rothschild gives the sense that for the Giants' fans the game was entirely separate from the events of the weekend. They all comprehended that something terrible had happened, but the game itself was an honest distraction in the meantime. Football was a game. Kennedy and Oswald were real life. What separated those two worlds of reality was a void of knowledge, an absence of the intrusive media that we have today, though it could be said that the events of that weekend in 1963 ensured that such a void would not remain for long.

But even today, the world may change, but the games stay the same. You might have voted for one candidate three years ago and are now already following a fashionable wave of indifference toward him today, but three bad seasons for your football team mean nothing to you. If they do, then you're not really a loyal fan, you're an enthusiast. And that's fine; you might be healthier that way. Once the commemorative ceremonies ended, there was still the Jets-Cowboys season opener to play, a game very like one played ten years ago or even forty-nine years ago, and Tony Romo still gave the game away with turnovers, just as Tony Romo often does.

***

Rothschild's article was written exactly ten years ago today, perhaps to give some perspective on why the NFL was reluctant to repeat Rozelle's mistake; they skipped a week after 9/11 and returned to action on September 23, 2001. The Jets played the Patriots at Foxboro in a game intended to unite the two teams, their fanbases, and the entire football community in one knitted brow of sorrow and determination. One sign in the Foxboro stands read, "GO PATS. GO JETS." Both the Jets and Patriots played listlessly, just the Giants did back in the day, just as one imagines two teams would at a time of massive grief.

But this Jets-Patriots game represents a different ten-year milestone - a pivotal moment that signaled a radical change in the history of the two clubs. This was the night that Mo Lewis #57 knocked out Patriots quarterback Drew Bledsoe. There were little more than five minutes left, and the Jets were ahead 10-3. Bledsoe scrambled for the sidelines and was nearly there when he was blindsided by Lewis and hurled to the ground. You may be able to hear the hit in the video below; many people on the field claimed it was the hardest hit anyone had ever heard. A blood vessel burst in Bledsoe's chest, and he was unable to get up. Backup quarterback Tom Brady went in for him, and the rest is, as they say....

In order for a truly great rivalry to develop, one team has to be preeminent and the other the spoiler, the underdog. Since that night, the Patriots and the Jets have been repeating a pattern built by the consequences of that hit. They were already trading coaches and players, but as soon as one of them became a Super Bowl champion later that year, the war of words and gestures that followed developed into one of the great spitting rivalries in the game. Until September 23, 2001, the Jets and the Patriots shared similar spaces near the bottom floors of the five-team AFC East, occasionally seeing one another take a trip to the penthouse, only then to end up in the same space again. After 2001, the format changed, and both teams have been consistently more competitive than Buffalo and Miami, but in the end we all know who's really better, and we all know why.

So the question begs: what if Lewis had pulled up? It's hardly right to blame him for not doing so. Though an excessive hit, it was a legitimate one, and the quarterback is fair game. In a quiet, defensive struggle, Lewis was simply doing his job; he had a fine career with several poor to underachieving Jet clubs, and it is unfair to spend this entire entry talking about him solely in the context of this one moment. But it did make a difference. It's a moment that haunts Jets fans because they're always inclined to believe that Fate works directly against them and in favor of the Patriots, and in this case Fate made a visit on the night football was supposed to return to normalcy.

Let's say Bledsoe stays as starter, and Brady goes somewhere else in the NFL. It's difficult to imagine a Belichick team excelling without Tom Brady, though you could say that 2008 was as close as an example of that as we will find. Where would Brady have played, if not for the Patriots? Would he have ended up a good quarterback on struggling teams, as Matt Cassel, Kevin Kolb or Matt Shaub have? Was he special all along, with or without Belichick?

Drew Bledsoe can be forgiven for not anticipating any of this. As he lay in pain on the Patriots' sideline, he certainly knew his night was done, but he probably never entertained the possibility that his career with the Patriots was over, too. Nor could he have known he would be replaced by the greatest quarterback in football history. We can all be forgiven for being unable to see the Hand of Fate in the form of Mo Lewis.