An Aggressive Game Plan Leads to an Improbable Win

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The New York Sun

This was no fluke. Though the Jets were outgained by 100 yards, they were the better team. They out-hit, out-finessed, and out-gutted the New England Patriots yesterday on the Pats’ own field. Two weeks ago, the Jets lost to the Cleveland Browns, and now they’ve beaten the Patriots for what might be the biggest two-game swing of any team in the league this year. The victory says much about Eric Mangini’s ability to rally a team at the most desperate point of the season; it also says much about how far the Patriots have declined. Exactly what it says about the Jets will take us one more week to find out.

Let’s take that middle point first: The Patriots are a shell of the team that won the 2005 Super Bowl; what the Jets did was expose that. Their best tackler and maybe their pass rusher is a 37-year-old inside linebacker, Junior Seau, who, after 17 years, is probably playing his last NFL season; their second best rusher (and leading rusher against the Jets) is Corey Dillon, a 31-year-old whose best games are behind him; their leading wide receiver, Reche Caldwell, is averaging just 10.5 yards a catch, less than you’d expect from a typical tight end, and Tom Brady looks just awful. Brady’s passes are getting shorter and shorter — three times against the Jets Sunday he completed two consecutive passes without getting a first down. He’s also become gun shy: The Jets sacked him four times, but on one of them, a crucial third down play in the fourth quarter, he went down without being touched, a fact that the CBS announcers, probably out of respect for Brady’s three Super Bowl rings, chose to overlook.

But make no mistake, the principal reason the Patriots looked bad — and they looked as bad yesterday as they did the week before, when they lost to the Indianapolis Colts — was the Jets. This victory was all about aggression. Faced with the extinction of their season, Mangini and his staff chose to do the opposite of what most teams do when facing a superior foe (and New England was much the superior team, at least coming into this game): They designed an aggressive game plan on both sides of the ball, blitzing on 40 of the Patriots’ 66 plays. More importantly, perhaps, when they weren’t blitzing they were showing blitz, something that neither Tom Brady nor Mangini’s mentor, Bill Belichick, expected.

On offense, the Jets weren’t, in truth, a great deal more effective than they were in some of their losing efforts this season, but they sure looked as if they were trying harder. On the sloppy turf, Chad Pennington couldn’t control the wet ball any better than his New England counterpart, but 17 of his 33 passes came on first or second down. (Someone in the Jets’ offensive brain trust finally got hip to the fact that you are far more likely to complete a pass, or at least not get sacked or intercepted, on first and second down than on, say, third-and-nine.) With a little less than six minutes to play, Pennington began two out of three series with first down passes, gaining seven and eight yards and setting up two key first downs. A third first down, just as significant, came on a 12-yard slash by Kevan Barlow, whose path up the middle was made clear because the Pats took out two linebackers and substituted two defensive backs in anticipation of a pass.

Actually, the Jets’ win was about aggression and execution. They drew just four flags all afternoon and fumbled the slippery ball not once. (New England fumbled twice.) Pennington was sacked only once, and, that wisely, when he refused to put the ball up for grabs. And, the Jets finally got a big play — the biggest, in fact, of the season — late in the fourth quarter when Jerricho Cotchery made the best catch I’ve seen in the NFL this year. Dropping back from the 22, Pennington could see that Cotchery, in the right corner of the end zone, was well covered by a defensive back in front and a safety from behind. He looped the ball anyway, assuming that Cotchery would catch it. And he did, with a leaping over-the-shoulder grab to the amazement of the Pats’ D-back who was waiting with his arms outstretched. The game-winning play showed aggressiveness not just on Cotchery’s part but on the part of Pennington, who normally, when seeing his man double-covered in that situation, would have thrown the bal out of the end zone and settled for the field goal try.

The Jets’ improbable victory frees them to think of next Sunday’s meeting with the Bears as a one-game season. If the Jets can suck it up again and beat the Bears at the Meadowlands, the rest of their schedule will all be sharply downhill: not a single game against a team with a winning record (though playing the Packers in Green Bay in December will be no day at the beach). They have already won more games this year than in 2005, and the key to the rest of the season will be in not being satisfied with that fact.

Mr. Barra is the author of “The Last Coach: A Life of Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant.”


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