NY Super Bowl My Butt

Thank God the Jets lost to the lowly Broncos yesterday. I was getting a little tired of the all-New York Super Bowl hype I’d been hearing all week ad nauseum. The Jets don’t have the character of a true Super Bowl team as they proved yesterday.

Think of the last few Super Bowl teams. New England, Indianapolis, and our own Giants. QB’s…Brady, Peyton, Eli…..Coaches….Belichick, Dungy, Coughlin. I could go on, traversing every position on the field but the Jets just don’t measure up to those Super Bowl teams.

Not to be unkind but the Jets succumbed to the theories of their own greatness. After beating the Pats and then the Titans, they really thought they were hot. It didn’t occur to them, maybe, that the Broncos were a totally different team, a team with a real live passing game.

It didn’t occur to them that there may have been a big difference from Titans QB Kerry Collins to Broncos QB Jay Cutler. All the way down their respective rosters, the Broncos are superior to the Titans. The Titans are just a running team. Stop the run and you stop the Titans.

The Jets weren’t prepared for any adversity on Sunday. You could tell that from the opening kickoff to the final gun. It was cold and rainy too, and Favre just really wasn’t interested. After all, who would notice a clunker thrown in on the last Sunday in November? It wasn’t a team in the AFC East, they had a cushion in the East on the Pats and the Dolphins, it was time to coast past the Broncos.

Surely, they thought, we could stop their running game. Surely, then they would stop the pass. Well, it didn’t turn out that way, of course, but the Jets didn’t react, even after it became quite apparent that the Broncos weren’t going to be content with just holding the lead in the AFC West. They wouldn’t be making any turnovers this day.

The Jets just weren’t prepared to play. I don’t put the blame on Mangini, although he can’t be held blameless. The same goes for Favre who was pretty dreadful in the rain yesterday. It’s a team responsibility, heart. The Giants have it, clearly. The Steelers have it, the Chargers don’t have it, the Jets don’t have it.

I wouldn’t even mind if the Jets had come back. But they didn’t. They were content to tuck their tails between their knees and go home. They are a seriously-flawed team, not from a talent perspective as from a character point of view.

Chad Pennington, I might add, did not have a character problem and still doesn’t, as evidenced by his bringing the Dolphins back to respectability. His Jets played with a lot of heart but they didn’t have the talent in his time. Now, they clearly have the talent but not the heart. A large part of the heart got shipped to Miami.

You see the lack of character all over the NFL. Plax’s gun incident is a very clear example. How easy it is for a man to go from the heights to the depths when he is conspicuously lacking character. All those physical attributes that make him such a talent on the football field couldn’t save him from the debacle that will be his life from here on.

It’s a good thing that Burress has been such a small part of the Giants’ success this year. The team seems to be carrying on without missing a beat. The beat goes on and it will go on without Burress. But it may not go on against the best teams in the NFL, a team that has a balanced offense and defense, a team such as the Pats were last year before they were beaten by the Giants with Burress.

Is there a team though that meets those qualifications this year? In either the AFC or NFC? I don’t think so.

You could possibly make a case for the Steelers. They have Ben Roethlisberger at QB, and some talent at the receiver position. They have a formidable defense too, and, in the person of Troy Polamalu, they have the most talented player in either league. They can run the ball too, but not as well as a Super Bowl team should. Their offensive line doesn’t seem strong enough to support either part of their overall offense.

Their potential to fulfill that Super Bowl contender position will be seriously challenged next Sunday when the Cowboys come to town. The Cowboys have Romo back, and he does not seem to be the Romo of last year, not from the perspective of character.

Romo seems to have grown into a leader this year, his injury and the subsequent Cowboys demise seems to have challenged his whole being, and his performance in the games since his injury seems to bear that out. He is one of those players who can make everyone around him better, at least this year.

The Colts have always been a team with character. They were hit hard by injuries this year, and seem to be a little slow in coming back from them. Their performance against the Browns yesterday wasn’t that of a playoffs contender though, unless it was the Browns that made them look bad, a Browns team that seems to lift its game against better opponents, as evidenced by their victory over the G-Men this year.

Who else is there? There are Carolina and the Bucs in the AFC, the Panthers with conspicuous talent on both sides of the ball. But I don’t think Carolina has the heart. They are a team much like the Jets. The Bucs may have the character but not as much talent as is required to reach the heights, at least on the offensive side of things.

A team that turned in that performance against the Broncos yesterday could never reach the Super Bowl. Forget about it. They probably already have.