The Belated Super Bowl Post

Traditionally, the list of the Greatest Games in NFL History begins with The Greatest Game Ever Played, the Colts' 23-17 OT victory over the Giants in 1958. Next, the list usually puts Super Bowl III in second, with our Jets defeating the nearly unbeaten Colts in January 1969. Now, we finally witnessed THE greatest game in NFL history, and Joe's Guarantee will take a tertiary place in history, with Alan Ameche's game-ending touchdown now in second.

First, some crow. In my entry entitled "Of Prospects Drear," I said the following: "The Giants will not go far in the playoffs. What possible chance against New England or the Colts? This is Tom Coughlin's last year. Like other New York teams, they look like a team that's still hoping that no one notices how scared they are to win outright." So I eat crow, willingly and gladly. I'd rather be wrong than the Patriots be 19-0. I know I'm not alone in getting Coughlin and the Giants wrong. However, I do recall suggesting to many people that the Giants really were the only team that could beat the Pats. Somewhere in all our hearts - and I suspect in the hearts of many Pats fans - there linked the inevitable sense that Big Blue would not just endure, but prevail.

As my brother, the Giants fan, said to me, second only to his team's glorious victory was his knowing that Tiki Barber was watching from home and that Jeremy Shockey was watching from the press box and not from the field.

He has every right to his euphoria, and not just for being a Giants fan. This year's Super Bowl was exactly what the game of football - America's game - desperately needed after a year riddled with ignominy and underachievement (and not just the Jets'). It was a beautiful, majestic game played heroically by two teams who met each other's match, no matter what their records. I think it so extraordinary that no matter how titanic the persona of the Unbeatens, we all sensed that the New York Giants, one of the lowest performing teams to make it to the Super Bowl, were exactly the team - indeed the only team - capable of performing the awesome job put before them. Players and coaches on the Giants had failed to prove themselves under different pressures during the past year, yet they found a new sense of resolution and calm under the greatest pressure possible. In this sense, in his final drive against New England as time was expiring, Eli Manning found a groove that is often elusive to players throughout their entire careers.

And it was beautiful to watch because I despise the Patriots' industrial precision. The plain truth was that Tom Brady was beaten because it had been a long, long time since he had played under such continuous pressure from such a defensive rush. He was constantly battered, thrown, rattled and distracted by a front line that had decided to play a relentlessly perfect game of its own. He overthrew Randy Moss once too often as a result. Then, to see Belichick misjudge the game clock so as to leave the field before the final play was an appropriate gesture from a character riddled with flaws.

It may have been unconscious of him, but then a coach never misses sight of the clock. He knows how much time there is all the time, and to rush the Giants to their celebration before the game was done may have been the shoddiest gesture of all, as if what was most important was not the Giants' extraordinary win but the Patriots extraordinary loss. In his postgame interview with Chris Myers - an admittedly thankless task for any losing coach - Belichick did not even acknowledge that the Giants were to be congratulated on what they had done; he said "they" made the plays and "we didn't." It was ungracious and unmanly of him to speak thus.

But enough bile. There will be plenty of it for two games next year when we play the Pats at home and away. Meanwhile, this game alone will keep my spirits high until pitchers and catchers arrive late in February. It was the greatest game ever played.

Thus It Ends,...

And a great wave of relief washes through my system. Mike Nugent's field goal sails through the uprights. The Jets win, 13-10.

"Four and twelve!" I say, my arms raised in what can only be described as a seriously compromised sense of victory. My wife remains unmoved. But wait. Of course. A holding penalty on Wade Smith.

There is no undiluted pleasure. The play goes from being a 33 yard attempt to a 43 yard attempt. The idea of enduring the game much longer seems cruel, but then I've been here before. It's the end of another gruesome season. There have been several shots of a lone fan wearing a D'Brickshaw Ferguson jersey - standing on a seat, mind you - from the concrete peak of the Meadowlands, surveying with a restless sense of undiminished purpose the conclusion of a meaningless game against a Chiefs team that has lost eight straight games. (If only Miami had been in their division, but then Kansas City is coached by Herman Edwards, and my sympathy dies there. Ha.) So few fans actually came to the game that the announcers speculated with uncharacteristic savvy that it was possible that CBS' cameras had panned across the man in the #60 jersey as many as six separate times.

Mike Nugent's field goal sails through the uprights. The Jets win, 13-10. Thus it ends, and a great wave of relief washes through my system.

"Four and twelve!" I say, my arms raised in what can only be described as a seriously compromised sense of victory. My wife remains unmoved.

****

It has been a ponderously dull season. Maybe it's because I went off Paxil four months ago. Maybe it's just that football in general has become less important in light of the existential funk into which I fell when someone in my family died young and unexpectedly in early December. Maybe my job has just been bothering me too much. Maybe that fucking dog that my neighbor leaves alone to bark and whine day in and night out in the apartment next door to mine makes me perpetually insane with anxious rage.

In Philadelphia, an unpleasant pallor has colored the complexions of most Eagles fans. They are angry with Andy Reid for being a bad parent or a bad coach or both. They are angry with Donovan McNabb because he is getting old. Should the Eagles really have kept Jeff Garcia and sent Donovan to the Bucs? Hardly. If they were Jets fans, they would have had plenty of similar disappointments, watching as we have all kinds of former favorites going to the Pro Bowl wearing someone else's helmet.

To be fair, this hasn't been a good year to enjoy athletes in America. Of late, they seem like an unpleasant manifestation of all the things we dislike about a society that we seem unable to change. Perhaps in them we see the bloated sense of entitlement that comes to people who possess power and money in the United States who also want to shirk responsibility for their actions and ideas.

The plain truth is that the glaring disparities between the classes in America leave us loathing and envying those who possess more than they will ever need. Professional athletes only get to the top through hard work and practice. Theirs is hard work. No one would question that. It comes down to money. Glaring up at these high-paid performers makes us wonder if we'll ever get there, especially since many of us - me, actually - work our asses off in work that will always underpay us, not overpay us. Such is the American economic status quo. We grind away, buying on credit, living with minimal health coverage, placing our standard of living at risk. Meanwhile the extravagantly paid gods in American sports play out the contradictory allegories of our age. This is how we roll.

I read somewhere this year (you know you're reading a blog when a sentence begins that way) that contentment runs statistically high among northern European countries because their populations go through the day with low expectations for happiness and success. I'm sure this also means a high rate of suicide attempt, but, well, whatever... My point is that being a Jets fan means having low expectations. I feel bad for Philly fans - their expectation for high performance is labored with a self-involved cynicism that somehow always means that they are right - even when they're unhappy (especially when they're unhappy). That's not living with limited expectations; that's wallowing in misery. I've made that point often on these pages, and I'll keep it mind as the real-life miseries of the winter compound. As my wife pointed out to me, the Jets cannot lose next week. There is that.

Tonight, We Are All Giants Fans

I wouldn't say this if I didn't mean it. We are all united today. Just take a look at the logos in the corners of this snapshot if you don't believe me (as if Giants fans would be comfortable with that!) I trust that if it were the Cowboys who were unbeaten going 15-0 against the Jets, the Giants would feel the same. It was a good game, but going ahead of the Patriots is always a bad idea. Ask Philly. Ask Baltimore. Don't ask the Jets because they have never had that luxury against the Pats this year.

Go Jints

Every time I have written in support of whichever team is playing the New England Patriots, the outcome has been a New England win. That must be why the Patriots are undefeated.

How about the NFL's decision to broadcast the final game of the Giants' season. When I was a kid, one of the treats of the end of the football season was Saturday games. No college football, only pro games on Saturday. Much ill has been made of the NFL Network, and knowing the NFL, the network's decision to keep competitive games toward the end of the season within their clutches will stay in place next year. But apparently John Kerry threatened to have Senate hearings to discuss the matter of the network's existence, so now the game will be seen by all this Saturday. Kerry's constituents will have a chance to see the game after all. Hearings called off. False alarm. Who better to extort the billion dollar league than the Federal Government?

Man, I hope the Giants win.

A Farewell to Arms

We know Chad Pennington became a backup quarterback and remained thus (despite having a better QB rating than his younger colleague) until Kellen Clemens became injured in last week's game. We know that one way or the other, it makes no real difference. I want a new set of options for arms.

Tis the season for giving. I give you the best reassurances I can offer:

- The New York Jets lost 20-10, not by an atrocious total, and it would have been 13-10 had Kellen Clemens not thrown an injury-rendering pass to the Patriots for an easy touchdown. Again - none of these are in any order.

- Yes, the New England Patriots have San Francisco's draft pick next year, but the Jets have never done anything so worthwhile with the draft such that we need to bemoan this cosmic injustice. The Jets may yet finish with the same record as the Niners, and maybe they will steal the Patriots' pick, and not the other way round.

- The Jets did not lose to Miami, nor did they give up the Buccaneers' first kickoff return for a touchdown. They were also not victims of the New York Mets' first no-hitter. Thank goodness.

- Thomas Jones will gain 1,000 yards before the end of this season. Jerricho Cotchery will as well. You will find their names on lists.

- Joe Namath finally received his Bachelor's Degree from the University of Alabama this past week.

- David Harris deserves consideration for Rookie of the Year. Stop laughing.

- The New York (football) Titans' uniforms are spectacular reminders that the New York Jets' green and white remains one of the classiest in the game. I can't believe I just said that, but I did. I mean, can you possibly take the Vikings' monochrome home uniforms seriously? Holy God. They look like something Mummenshauntz would wear (below).

- Kerry Rhodes remains tied with six other players for seventh place in the NFL with five interceptions. Number one draft choice Revis has four. Who says the draft doesn't (kind of) work?

- We are not in last place, nor will we by the end of the season.

- In a year when Devin Hester is described as a human miracle, Leon Washington - who did not get into the Pro Bowl (no Jet did) - may tie a record for kickoff returns in one season. He is the Jets MVP, justifiably. As you can see, he thanks the Man Upstairs. It will suffice for me to thank you, Leon.

That's ten. So even in the season of tremendous disappointment, there is reason to be thankful. If I tried hard enough, I could think of one more, but to be honest, it would be too much of a stretch. There are other struggles with which I must contend before the holiday comes. I'm hoping that someday I'll find the Joe Namath sideline parka with the #12 on the front that I should have bought on sale years ago. No luck on Ebay. I might blow $125 on a NFL Throwbacks Namath jersey, which isn't so bad when I consider that the new couch we tried to have delivered to our apartment just barely did not fit into out unit, and we were forced to give it away, in this case to a local women's shelter. It's a tax write-off. It's been just exactly that kind of football season.

Let It Snow

The hopes of geriatric Dolphins and anyone else who loves the game of football rest on the Jets' ground game (smile quietly to yourself) and a wealth of snow to prevent Randy Moss from catching ridiculously open touchdown passes. That being said, is there really any reason why I should invest actual hope? No.

My sense of outrage over being hoodwinked and bamboozled by the cheating Patriots has long since passed. This entire football season has been a remarkable contrast to our last, with few surprises, few sublime moments. The Patriots are also 9-0 with heavy snowfall on the ground. My experience as a high school teacher leads me to believe that when you hope a lot for snow, you rarely get enough to close school.

The alternative to these basic realities are too awesome to contemplate, a little to much for a week of hell for my heart to entertain. No thank you. Just Endeavor To Score.

...or Not

The other alternative is to enjoy the pictures of the Titans of New York, hoopling up the largest margin of victory over the Dolphins this year. Ah well. I hope that it is at least understood that my primary concern is with the Patriots, whom I loathe beyond all human understanding. So, Monday Night...(sigh)...go, Baltimore Col- uh, Ravens. I mean Ravens. Go Ravens.


The funny part is that now everybody says Miami deserves to go winless. Word is that if you give up 40 points to the Jets, you deserve to go 0-16. Well, maybe so.

Of Flesh and Fish

I'm not alone in thinking this one of the less gratifying football seasons in years. It began with Michael Vick, I think; it continued with the bleakly efficient but shady Patriots living well beyond even the best expectations for their season; it has gruesomely continued with Sean Taylor's untimely death at his Miami home. Even if you're not a Jets fan, it seems like professional football only heightens America's compulsion to cannibalize itself.

One of the other disarming oddities of the year has been the failure of the Miami Dolphins. I'm aware of how many games they've lost only by a mere three points (including a loss to the Jets), but the point is that of all the seasons to lose every game, regardless of how many points decide it, they have managed it in a season when the Patriots might break the 1972 Dolphins' unbeaten record. The Jets might seem lackluster bystanders in all of this, except for the fact that they are playing the Fish this week.

It feels wrong to feel any real compassion for the Dolphins. They made a mockery of the Jets in the 1970's. They left the tarp off the field before the Mud Bowl in January 1983. They jump-started the Jets' famous collapse in 1994 with Dan Marino's Fake Spike. This is a franchise that has a richer playoff and championship experience than the Jets have had (that could describe a lot of teams) but Miami has also found the Jets to be an enormous challenge year by year, and it's always been fun to watch them struggle against us. And when things go wrong for the Jets, as they have this season, beating Miami has always been an oddly satisfying consolation.

So two cheers for the Dolphins. I feel confident that the Jets will stumble, and if they do, it will be an oddly satisfying moment. The Jets have also taken their pound of flesh of Fish. They registered a winning streak against them from 1978-81 even when the Dolphins did better overall. Indeed the Dolphins have often been nettled by the Jets the way that Tom was by Jerry. Throughout, beating them has always made me feel better about being a Jets fan. No matter what, our friends in the Sunshine State have always had to take their friends in the north seriously - especially when too many of those Floridians were transplanted New Yorkers who became Dolphin fans. At least a win against them could make you feel better about the lost season.

When Jerry noticed that the local neighborhood dog had gotten the best of Tom, he went out of his way to thwart the bully canine so that Tom could go back to tormenting him. Why not allow them to avoid the shame of being winless during the Patriots' perfect season by playing Jerry to their Tom? After all, we aren't going anywhere this year. Dolphins fans will always be grateful to us for that.

(Thanks)

I have a student who is that unique Philadelphia phenomena - a Dallas Cowboys fan. Philadelphians who are Cowboy fans are often born in adolescence, at a time when they wanted to tell someone important in their lives - a father, an uncle, a friend - or a teacher - to fuck off. What better way than to give the bird to the Birds, their fans, everybody around you.

Philadelphians are dedicated with sincerely formed ambivalence toward the Phillies, the Flyers, the Sixers. Each demographic tends to align itself to one of the teams. When they are playing well, the Sixers attract the majority African-American population, though there are plenty of Cavalier and Laker fans around; the Flyers command the attention of the white Northeastern and South parts of the city. But the Eagles get everyone, and with everyone, the Eagles get all the angst and complicated, layered rage that accompanies all the city's disparate parts. They are the city's common obsession, and like many obsessions, its object never benefits from the attention in the long run.

So when a Philadelphian turns Cowboy, it's a decided reaction against the prevailing wind. It is a desire to draw attention to oneself by loving the hated. This student of mine is an annoying, self-centered, creepy little man who tries to sleep in class all the time; he is the very definition of a Philadelphia Cowboy fan. And on Monday, he is going to love himself all the more. "His boy," as he refers to Terrell Owens, will probably have a lot to celebrate. In their best seasons (like this one), the Dallas Cowboys have always had a cosmic self-assertion on Thanksgiving that seems almost to imply that they invented the holiday for themselves. America's Team. God's team. The mascots of the Southern Baptist Convention. Blech.

The 2-8 New York Jets come to Texas Stadium tomorrow on Thanksgiving. Through history, Dallas has pulverized the Jets - 52-10 in Irvine in 1971; 30-7 in 1978 at Shea; 28-7 in 1993 at the Meadowlands. To my memory, there are two close losses - 31-21 at Shea in 1975 and 38-24 in 1987. And that last one was the strike year. Replacement Cowboys versus Replacement Jets. Even then.

Prepare yourself for the Divine Wind. It is God's team, as assured of salvation as a newly saved parochial Texan who wants to make his momma proud again. My student doesn't know what he's representing in being a Cowboys fan, but if he knew how repugnant I really found it, I suppose he would love it all the more.

1-8

I must be a patient man. My student asked me how I liked what his Redskins did to my Jets. Can he possibly understand - mere wisp of a youth that he is - what another stupid, avoidable loss like yesterday's does to me? Can he have any concept? He is 17, after all. He's old enough to go to an R-rated film alone. When he is a pathetic, paunchy 38 year-old man, will he still be heartbroken when "his" Redskins drop another game because of dropped passes, or when they accept a penalty and make the opposition retake a punt that gives over even worse field position? I certainly hope not, for his sake. I wouldn't wish this on even the most obnoxious of young bandwagon jumpers. He'll be a lot happier at that point if he jumps on someone else's wagon by then. I would advise him to do just that.

Thrown Away

If I don't add an entry, then the swarm of information from the intraweb overwhelms what there is of A Fan's Life. Seventy-nine entries, but "what have you done for us lately?" The same could be asked of the Jets, who labor at 1-6.

I have never known a Jets season to be so perfectly consistent in one weird statistic: game-closing interceptions. In weeks 2, 4, 6, and 7, Pennington (and Clemens week 2) has thrown the game away. He gets honorary mention for week 5 when the game against the Giants still seemed within reach late in the fourth quarter, though the Giants eventually won with more than just an interception of his pass for a touchdown. The Bengals just about finished us off with one late in the game last week. It adds a new stress to the question of whether Pennington should be benched, although one cannot ignore that his numbers are largely good throughout each game. But hey - who's really paying attention, anyway? The Giants are playing well, albeit against poor teams like the Jets, but even a Giants head cold gets more attention than a Jets clean bill of health, so why should anyone care about the Jets' woes?

I do, still. Of course. How is that ever going to change? I'm going over stats of the games and wondering the way a good Jets fan does; he considers what might have been. We've been lucky to walk away from games in the past, shaking our heads mostly with contentment and wonder. Now, not so much. All we can do is reflect on how close we've been. Great teams find a way to win, and though the Jets might not even be a good team this year, you'd hardly be a good Jets fan if you didn't consider what might have been if Pennington had made it on those final drives. Seriously, look at the game breakdowns. They might right now be 4-3, still wondering what kind of season they were having.

But here, in the reality-based fandom, we recognize what kind of season this is. We've had experience with disappointing performances for decades now. We know how the Jets are doing. The offense is cumbersome, uninspired, and apparently easy to read late in the game. Jonathan Vilma is out. This all sounds familiar. We like it better in the fantasy. Just end the season.

The Lame Game

All this week I have been forced to endure a barrage of insults from the young Philadelphians with whom I work. The truth is we are, all of us, fans of a team with one win under their belt. The Eagles are playing in the shadow of three other superior teams in their Eastern Division. I had thought that the Jets were better team than the Bills, but I was wrong; they are just barely better than a pushover Dolphins club. If you want to see why both the Jets and the Eagles will be staying home in January, you need only watch the Patriots-Cowboys game at 4:15 pm this afternoon.

The Eagles fans with whom I work in Delaware County know how much I love the Jets, but that doesn't matter when it comes to heckling. But then their heckling doesn't really matter either. They do it with a kind of an overly self-conscious skepticism about their own team that undermines the effect of their pepper:

"Jets suck worse than the Eagles, man."

"Yo. Jets are going down, asshole."

"God, I hate this hoagie. Sort of like the way I hate the Jets."

"Jets won't fly like the Eagles will. Asshole."

And so on. Always with a sound to their voice that conveys a feeling of unease, sort of the kind that says, "But, you know, if the Eagles don't win, I won't be surprised." I've never been good at heckling, myself. Philadelphia fans are famous for booing Santa Claus, but they are the really best known for being able to tell you after-the-fact why they were sure their team was going to lose all along. And frankly, writing this as I am near halftime of the game, I can imagine how my pals at work were chattering to one another in front of their TV's about Brian Westbrook's dominance (especially after his called-back touchdown run) but are probably also now saying that they've always known all along how overrated a kicker David Akers is, particularly after he's badly shanked a second kick in the first half.

As for the Yets, I've seen some terrible missed tackles and the usual unimaginative offense that's fooling no one. The entire season is going to be like this. Ben Graham's decent punt late in the second half produced nothing more than opportunity for Graham to show off some of his Australian Rules tackling abilities when none of his colleagues on the down field coverage could get to little Reno Mahe. No harm done. Akers missed his kick. Ugh. And this is pro football?

It will be nice to hear what the geniuses at work have to say about the Jets' Titans uniforms. Unless the Eagles really do open up against us, my colleagues are not going to have anything to grind into me other than a Jets loss - unless they want to make noise about the mighty blue and mustard that Titans of New York are wearing today. They look like the Chuck Knox Los Angeles Rams of the 1970's. The New York Titans became extinct for a reason; they were mediocre. Their legacy lives on, though. The Jets' 2007 season certainly pays tribute to that so far.

Are They Serious?

I'm at a loss here. Who broke the NFL rules? Who operates above the rules while appearing to embody the best characteristics of NFL coaching on "60 Minutes?" Is it necessary to posit Mangini as an equal villain in Belichick's unethical mess because it makes the drama more Shakespearean? The New England coach got what he plainly deserved. In a competitive business, what exactly does Mangini owe Belicheck? Nothing now. Does it matter that other coaches object to Mangini's actions? Not at all. Would they not have done the same had they the same background with Belichick that Mangini has? You better believe they would have.

But Selena Roberts of the Times actually suggests that Mangini is the Judas here. The New York Jets cannot win the battle of New York even when they are in the ethical right. The Times story accompanying Pennington's return this weekend was a footnote to their story of whoever it was replacing Sam Roberts in the secondary for the Giants. Business as usual, I guess.

Shades of the Darkness

So after all the fuss over whether or not the fans were cheering Chad Pennington's injury, the real scandal was underneath their scornful eyes the whole time. Belichikgate. What kind of fan would I be if I didn't feast on the slightly wounded, otherwise freakishly good killing machine that is the New England Patriots? In truth, the killing machine is only vaguely stunned. Nevertheless, I will muster some righteous, if not rambling indignation.

Bill Belichick, ladies and gentlemen. Schmuck. A graceless, paranoid, shabby little man. We all know that even without videotaping the defensive signals of "an opponent" (HELLO?! How come every article I read about this refers to the Jets as "an opponent?" Isn't J-E-T-S easier to spell??) the New England Patriots would still be able to beat most of the teams in the AFC. But the crucial question is whether or not Belichick feels the same way. It's his team, isn't it? Wherefore the confusion? If you have the best team in the NFL, then why the need to cheat?

The answer might be partially found in New England itself. My ex-friends who live there provide evidence of the strange and infectious mindset of the world the Puritans once called home. I still don't really think New Englanders (read: Bostonians) really know what to do with the Red Sox since they won the World Series. This is the area of America that had the greatest squad in any sports with the Boston Celtics of the 60's and 70's, yet it couldn't muster the decency to make Bill Russell - the greatest basketball player of the era - feel even slightly welcome. My own in-laws from Boston acted like my wife was too uppity when she accepted a scholarship to go Barnard rather do a co-op than Northeastern. This is an area of the world that subconsciously wants the ball to go through Bill Buckner's legs - a place that doesn't want success unless it's complicated by a simultaneous misery, like an annoying ringing in the ear that won't go away.

At last...a scandal worthy of the comparison to Watergate! OK, fine, but there is a little of Richard Nixon in Bill Belichick. Nixon didn't need to bug the Democratic Headquarters, just as Belichick didn't need to violate NFL policy and steal the Jets' signs. (I promise; I'm not just loving the analogy because the Jets are the underachieving McGovernites). The temptation to cheat probably became too intense when the ringing in Belichick's ear probably became too impossible for him to ignore. No level of greatness is enough; how could it be? There are enemies everywhere. Cheating's the only way to guarantee that they will consider him a real success.

There are several informal coaching schools throughout the game. There's the Walsh school, the Gibbs school, the Noll school. Belichick learned through Bill Parcells, and although cheating was probably beneath the Tuna's gargantuan ego, there is a well-known darkness about the old teacher that I'm sure he engendered in the pupil. I remember scenes of Parcells as Jets coach haranguing Belichick about his defensive coordinator calls right in the middle of the game. His insistent, nasty remarks at Belichick - even snippets of them - were insulting, really. I've never seen another head coach do that to his assistants with as much venom as Parcells did. Perhaps that insistent ringing in Belichick's ear is the lingering voice of Parcells himself - a man who insulted his first wife's intelligence on 60 Minutes while he was still married to her.

So no wonder Eric Mangini is a little weird. His characteristic secretiveness stems probably from a similarly regenerated darkness within Bill Belichick, the mentor who shook our coach's hand is if it were a slab of raw chicken. Let's hope the darkness doesn't catch up with Mangini, at least no more than is already evidenced by his obsessive silence with the normally curious press about his player's injuries.

Did They? Are They?

Stop.

First of all, it's easy to blame New York Jets fans for what prognosticators not in attendance at the Pats game conveniently decided was a cheering of Chad Pennington's injury. I've always taken heart from the fact that Keith Olbermann has been able to rightly label Bill O'Reilly or Ann Coulter as "The Worst Person in America," but the device is not converting well over to the halftime at NBC's Hockey Night in Canada.

From checking with fans who were at the game, the consensus is unclear. Yes, some cheered when Chad limped off and Kellen blessed himself and went on. Some cheered Chad's grit - a character trait that we have come to admire about him, even though some of us (not yours truly) think that he's not up to the task. My main question is, did anyone cheer him when he was down? To me that's the conclusive evidence of craven behavior. When Michael Irvan was injured badly for good in Philadelphia, the fans at the Vet cheered loudly. That was the gold standard for shit behavior, or just Philly fans doing their thing.

So what happened? Suddenly Jets fans have to defend their integrity. Tony Kornhiser says it was a classless gesture. Steve Young said New York's the toughest market and anyone who plays there needs to know that this kind of thing can happen. Nice guys finish last. Tom Rock of Newsday says the whole thing is a tempest in a teapot and that no one there can conclusively say that the entire Meadowlands was cheering for one thing, sort of like the noise of Dylan fans in 1966 at Manchester.

"Judas!"

This is, eventually, crap. We are all wasting valuable time wondering whether or not 78,000 people all felt the same thing. Actually, now that I think of it, there was one thing that many, many Jets fans in attendance felt when they saw it happen. Too many felt, "Holy God, not again." Full stop. It's called trauma. What came out of them after that was subject to how much alcohol they had consumed in the tailgate, what kind of relationships they had with their parents growing up, how often they were bullied in school, and what kind of sex life they are currently enjoying at home. It's a fan's life, after all.

But for you boo birds who think that we need a new quarterback any way possible, I can only say that you are like cheap floozies who think that the next well-meaning guy who comes along is going to get you out of the trailer park. I'm glad Chad Pennington went back out and scored. I yelled and shouted and cried out in joy the way I cheered when Tom Tupa threw a touchdown after Vinny Testaverde went down against the Pats at home at the 1999 opener. It was a bellowing of traumatic anguish, sort of like James Cagney in White Heat:

"Look, Ma! Top of the World!!"

BOOOOOMMM!!

The Agony and the Agony

Regular season is back. Now my life can return back to normal. I don't need to supplement the wonder and love of professional football with lame things like the Tour De France or the NBA Finals. Baseball is more engaging - with many competitive teams this year. But football is its own animal, a game of inches more than heartbreak. You don't lose because you were unlucky this time around. You lose because you weren't good enough.

And now having said that, football leaves me with that familiar sinking feeling. My team loses 38-14 to an obviously superior New England Patriots club. Randy Moss was great, Tom Brady was amazing, they scored the longest TD in NFL history, Chad Pennington was brave but hobbling, Kellen Clemens was beguiled, Thomas Jones was neutralized. I hate myself, I hate my life. I want to die.

How much do I hate the New England Patriots? I don't talk to my in-laws anymore. During the last game of the 1997 season, while the Jets' loss to the Lions put the Pats in the playoffs, I sat with my in-laws from Boston; they screeched with glee, watching Barry Sanders finish off the Jets' season. They were just a little too happy - a little too happy to watch me suffer. OK, I'd be lying if I told you that the Lions' game was the only reason why we don't talk to them. I don't miss them, though. They were our guests, and they didn't respect that I loved the Jets. They taunted me, and I had bought those drunks a lot of scotch.

There was the opener against New England in 1999, when another Jet QB's foot planted into the hot Meadowlands turf and didn't let go. That was even more traumatic. I was at a reunion with former college friends, all of whom were Patriots fans. I should have known. When Vinny Testaverde went down with a season-ending Achilles' tendon fissure, they got up on their feet and laughed and sang like undernourished jackals who had decided that one of their own would make as nice a meal as anything they could have caught on their own hungry paws that night.

In that moment, I could see a primordial gleam in their eyes. Despite the fact that we must have spoken every day like family back in college, I could see that they really hated me for what I was, a Jets fan. They witnessed my pain and horror and laughed. So I walked out, leaving those bastards behind, and I have not spoken to them since. There's family, and then there's the Jets. At least the latter are more consistent, albeit not always to my pleasure. Still...there was no other way.

Today, the Patriots were the Jets' guests at Giants Stadium, and they manhandled us; we are the lesser team, they the prodigies. Their offense was literally unstoppable; ours was occasionally clever. When Coles made his nifty catch for the first quarter touchdown and made it 7-7, Belichik looked briefly worried at how methodical the Jets offense had been. But it was a passing moment. Pennington hobbled off. Yet even able and well, he never seemed up to the task of beating a team that seems to be surprising even itself with how good it is.

Here's why they won, though. Yes, yes, I know: we couldn't control their running game; they controlled the clock; Mangenius was out-geniused; Moss was amazing. Blah, blah, blah. But all week I was saying, "If Brady blows out his knee or snaps his Achilles', we win the game, we win the division." Back in 1999, the Patriots had no Super Bowl rings; we had one. My ex-friends sneered at Vinny's vanquished dream like disadvantaged children with nothing to lose, knowing that they weren't going anywhere either. In wishing ill will on Brady, I have sunk beneath those disadvantaged voices speaking out of crude despair.

Somewhere the jackals are still laughing, and I walk away, grumbling, irrational to the point of institutionalization. So, yes, life has returned to normal after all.

Gestes Top Jints

Watch Leon Washington's cut on his touchdown pass as many times as you like. He made a cut that, I swear, split him in half. The Giants did not follow the half with the ball. Without that play, it might only have been a 13-12 game, which, as I said earlier, would have made it like any other preseason game between the two teams. Naturally, when I looked up stats and whatnot, all the buzz was about the kind of game Eli Manning had. Of course. And so it goes.

Not that anyone is reading this, but I like to pretend I have to be beholden to the truth. I mean, I write about my life as a Jets fan on this site, so how could I possibly be the kind of person who would hold to standards of the truth? I am not exactly consumed by guilt about this; as my wife said to me about my taking the rap for something dumb I did around the house (I don't remember what it was, but that could describe thousands of things): "Yeah, well, it wasn't like you killed dogs or anything." No. No I did not. Not even one dog, let alone more than thirty. What can I tell you. Michael Vick has raised the bar on horror.

So, what was I going on about? Oh, the truth. A correction on the stadiums to be at the Meadowlands. On Gardner's old rubric of intelligences, my spatial intelligence would have been good enough to find a good diner in Secaucus without knowing any better, but I'm not good with graphs, diagrams and mapping skills. It took me a second there, but now I realize that, contrary to what I earlier thought, the two shots of the stadium do correspond to one another. Let's take a look at those pictures of the planned facility again.


Three tiers of the stadium in the round can be seen, except that one tier is missing in the fourth round nearest us. That was what confused me. Once I corresponded the image above with the one below, I saw in each of them a tower that peaks with an art deco spiral staircase at the edge of an enormous luxury box structure overlooking a lower tier of stands.


Take a look at that. Impressive and profoundly elitist, but that's sports. I was initially confused because I would have thought that a smaller set of outdoor stands would have been used at the end zone, not along the sidelines. But there we are - that's the shape of things.

The staircase encased in the glass tower puts me in the mind of Ibrox Stadium (I realize I've had the Old Firm on the brain lately, but then I'm the only one reading this, so whatever). It's a characteristic touch that, as far as I can see, is strictly for show.


If you look closely at this shot, you see the beautiful glass block structure framed by red brick peeking out in the far corner, a stairwell that, although it's a little hard to see, puts me in the mind of our stadium to be. I love stadium architecture, and needless to say, it's been a long time since a football stadium was built in this country with aesthetic touches that were strictly non-utilitarian.


This is what the other side of the stairwell looks like from the outside.

However, there is absolutely nothing to compete with the pointed roof structure of the new

Indianapolis Colts stadium to be - a football field house. Ridiculous, yes, but (and can one say this about anything in football?) exquisite, nonetheless.

Who Manchu?

It kind of felt like football was back for real when I watched the Packers-Jaguars game last night. As lame as it can be, the greatest liability of exhibition football is its TV coverage, which becomes distracting and empty-headed. I have neither world enough nor time to discuss how self-referential the Fox broadcast was. The more the broadcast experienced technical difficulties, the more it made the technical difficulties the focus of the coverage. It's as if the networks want to talk about anything but the game. The play's the thing.

Anyway, "will Brett Favre play another then years or not?" "Isn't amazing how old he is?" "Let's chat with him about how the younger guys call him 'sir.'" "Will he be able to get into a rhythm with the new players who were in grammar school when he first started?" "What if he doesn't?" Repeat.

Fox is nattering like fools the entire night, and what is the one inane, superfluous sideshow matter they entirely neglect? Aaron Rodgers' moustache. I mean, as a rule, they're supposed to neglect him because he's Favre's backup, but he's #12 and he has a fu manchu. Doesn't that signify anything to football people? Am I the only one who's seeing this? I am so alone.













You be the judge. Can a man destined to play Richard Todd to Brett Favre's Joe Namath be conjuring the 1968 Joe Namath voodoo? Aaron Rodgers: you manchu. That's who.

Exhibition Bowl!

In Glasgow, they call it the Old Firm. Between the Dodgers and Yankees in the 50's they called it the World Series. Between the Niners and the Raiders, I don't think they call it anything. I think San Franciscans just want Oakland people to stop using the term "Frisco." If I lived there, I'd probably be a Raiders fan, but don't tell my Dad that.

Anyway, if it's a matchup between the New York Giants of New Jersey and the New York Jets of New Jersey, then they call it week 3 of the preseason. Pretty hot, huh? How about "Exhibition Bowl?" Yeah, that sucks, too. The game is almost certainly designed to suck. It's typically agonizing, slow, and inept preseason.

The last Giants-Jets exhibition my wife and I went to was only memorable for the halftime entertainment, which featured a field goal kicking contest for selected fans sponsored by Levitra, a drug that treats what we now so mannerly refer to as "erectile dysfunction." Imagine the winking looks the sales reps gave as they unfurled the Levitra banners just as one unknowing kicker after another failed to "get it up" through the crossbars. "Get it?" the guys in the Levitra t-shirts seemed to say. "C'mon, fellas. Don't let the signified object of this otherwise harmless-looking metaphor happen to you. Go the distance."


Once, the game was the thing. Many a moon ago, in the time of my forefathers, two teams met for an exhibition game in August 1969 on neutral ground, the Yale Bowl, and the New York Jets beat the snot out of the only remaining NFL team to doubt the legitimacy of the AFL. The Jets beat the Giants 37-16. There was no pragmatic decision to bench the starters. Larry Grantham has said that players put off retirement just to play that game. Talk about workers putting their muscle behind the corporate brand. It was a religion, not a job. Mike Battle leaped like a gazelle over Giant defenders in his touchdown return of the opening kickoff. Dad still talks about that move. Only proud devotion could shoot a man so elegantly high in the air.

Dad also talks about going to the Yale Bowl for other Jets-Giants exhibition games in the early 70's whose drunken conflicts in the stands were very much in the style of scenes at Ibrox and Celtic Park. The bowl's construction itself meant that if you lost your balance, you were tumbling for a long, long while down. He says that civil wars broke out all around, and the only thing keeping the drunk guys above from rolling onto the field were guys lower down the bowl. Hot, sunny, fights, beer. That's pretty much all he recalls from it.

I have one other memory from the Levitra game that proves that some things don't change as readily as treatment for erectile dysfunction. My wife and I wore our jerseys to the Meadowlands amid a sea of red, blue, green, and white. At one point, every human soul there stopped to watch two fans, one Giants, one Jets, get hauled away from their business of battering one another. The fight was close to the field, which probably explains why so many players found it intriguing to watch, too. As the Giants fan in the Jeremy Shockey jersey was brought away by an impressive number of Meadowlands security staff, Jets fans along the way up took free shots at him. Then, in quick succession along the same route, Giants fans returned the favor to the pugilist in the Wayne Chrebet jersey when it was his turn to be arrested. It really isn't a rivalry until somebody gets hurt.

The two exhibition matchups I have been to at Giants Stadium were field goal fests decided by an unexciting point or two. When you leave, you actually find yourself asking, "Wait. Who won again?" 13-12, 16-15, 10-0. Real nail biters, especially for a guy like me who really doesn't need an excuse to bite his nails. I'm chomping on them right now with the fear that Pennington will be lost again for the season with yet another ridiculous injury against the Giants like he was three years ago. So who the hell cares about a good game? Stay healthy.

Then every four to five years, we meet again in the regular season, an honor we will repeat this year. If I'm not mistaken, the series is just about even. The first regular season meeting was a 22-10 Giants' victory in 1970, which I didn't even know about until I read about it. The critical moment in that game at Shea was when Fran Tarkenton partially instigated a goal-line fight with Jets players that cleared the two benches. Yeah. I know. Fran Tarkenton. That's how serious these guys were.

My favorite remains the infamous moment back at the Yale Bowl in the middle of the 1974 season when Joe Namath crossed the end zone by himself against the Giants after faking the handoff to Emerson Boozer, much to the surprise of even Boozer himself. Joe walked into the end zone, signifying his simultaneous desire to stop and not be stopped by offering the famous palm raised upward in fragile defense. "OK, guys," he seems to say, "play's over. Don't blow out what's left of my knees. OK, dudes? We cool?" Brad Van Pelt certainly thought so, and he was the guy Namath wanted to fake out with the move.

When the Jets lost 20-10 during the regular 1984 season, I was invited to watch the game on a large scale projection TV with my friend Doug and his family, all insane Giants fans. They made it clear that my presence there was an act of generosity. With me around, they were slumming. I kept getting the feeling that I needed to get up and take everyone's snack orders. When Freeman McNeil went down in the game, injured for the year, Doug forced only the slightest note of compassion out of grudging appreciation for our friendship.

Junior was a Giants fan on my floor in college who taunted me all week leading up to the last game of the 1988 regular season, a matchup between the Jets and Giants. He and I had a deal. If the Giants won, then all week I would wear his Giants mesh hat that was frankly deformed already by his misshapen head. The unthinkable for him occurred when the Jets won with an O'Brien to Toon touchdown, 27-21, and the Giants were forced out of the playoffs. Our deal stipulated that he wear my Jets t-shirt all week. He regarded it with disdain when I handed it to him, and that's even before he realized it had skipped many washing cycles, as was the case with most of my clothes back then.

Such moments of conflict can hardly be compared with the legendary cultural divide between members of the Old Firm. Indeed, the Jets and Giants share the Meadowlands, both present and future. The nameless stadium to be has no real coherent design. Take a look at the pictures below. Each seems to manifest an entirely different design. The second picture appears to put the field in the wrong direction, actually.


This is what happens when you have corporate park architects render their idea of a football stadium. Check out some of the other pictures of the proposed facility, and you'll only see more pictures of the proposed parking lot.

So now, amiability prevails. There are otherwise no distinctive markings on the arena, which might actually be a good thing, because if this is a joint Tisch-Johnson venture in the truest sense, then maybe this time the stadium won't be the sole nominal property of the Big Blue, the so-called flagship organization, the stuck-ups. Those bastards.