When Herman Edwards is fired as the Jets head coach – and watching him crash and burn yesterday, that now seems inevitable – we can point to the first half of the 20-17 loss to the Ravens as where the downslide began. In fact, we can pinpoint the exact play.

With 1:56 left in the first half, the Jets were having it all their way, up 14-0. The Jets defense was stuffing Jamal Lewis, and Curtis Martin was tearing through the interior of the much-heralded Ravens defense. Despite the loss of quarterback Chad Pennington, the Jets were moving the ball quite well with backup Quincy Carter, who had just hit wide receiver Santana Moss with a deep ball in Baltimore territory.

Just after the two-minute warning, with the ball on the Ravens’ 17-yard line, there didn’t seem to be any way that the Jets could fail to go into the locker room leading 17-0 or perhaps even 21-0. Ask a high school coach what to do in that situation, and he’ll tell you to run Curtis Martin off-tackle on first down, hope he gets at least 5 yards, and choose your second play accordingly. Ask a high school football coach what not to do in that situation, and he’ll say don’t ask a relatively inexperienced player to run a slow-developing trick play that has a high probability of disaster.

Edwards apparently had no high school coach to consult. He asked running back LaMont Jordan to throw a halfback pass, which he did, poorly, into the middle of three Baltimore defenders in the end zone. Any one of them might have intercepted it – it looked as if they had time to draw straws. Strong safety Ed Reed got the honors and took the ball from the end zone deep into Jets territory, setting up the Ravens for a cheap touchdown just before the half.

After the game, Edwards was asked why he called such an odd play.

“I thought LaMont could complete the pass,” he said. “We’ve run it many times in practice. He’s supposed to know that you don’t throw the ball if there’s coverage.”

That is true. The play is supposed to be a halfback option right, the option part meaning that the running back runs if the secondary stays with the receiver. Jordan made a bad read and put the ball up for grabs.

But the real question is why Jordan was set up to fail in the first place. Martin was in the midst of a terrific day on which he gained 119 yards on 28 carries. Carter, evading the Ravens’ pass rush with ease on his rollouts, had hit on all seven of his passes to that point. The Jets’ game plan at that point should have consisted simply of doing what they had been doing until the Ravens forced them to stop. Instead, Edwards took away from his team what Baltimore could not and put the Ravens back in the game.

The difference between a 17-point halftime lead and a 7-point advantage against a plodding team like Baltimore is enormous. As play-by-play man Jim Nantz put it, “The Ravens’ touchdown before the half has allowed them to stay within their game plan.” Which is a polite way of saying that the Ravens don’t really have a game plan on offense except to keep running Lewis and, if that fails, to throw on third-and-long and hope for the best.

This would have freed the Jets defensive front four – which, with the emergence of John Abraham might be the best in the league – to turn loose on Baltimore’s undersized offensive line and their mediocre quarterback, Kyle Boller. Offensive lines in the NFL are built for either the pass or the run, and Baltimore’s is built for the run – smaller and quicker than the Sumo wrestlers on pass-oriented teams.

For a team like the Ravens to have any chance, it can’t be consistently playing catch-up. But being down by one touchdown isn’t really that much of a catch-up, particularly when the momentum shifts. As Simms observed after Reed’s interception, “The wind seemed to go out of the Jets’ sails.”

For all that, the Jets had a decent chance to walk away victorious. They trailed 17-14 before their final possession in regulation time, when Carter revived the Jets’ attack for the first time in the second half, taking them to a 1st-and-goal from the Baltimore 4-yard line with 44 seconds and one timeout to go.

Edwards, for some unexplained reason, allowed the clock to run. On the sidelines, Chad Pennington frantically called for a time out, while Carter gestured to Edwards as if to say “What’s going on?”

Twenty-three precious seconds dribbled off the clock, and when the Jets finally ran a play, it was a one-yard plunge by Jordan – Martin did not get his hands on the football. On second down, Carter was forced to throw a roll-out pass out of bounds. This left the Jets with eight seconds instead of about 30 with a 3rd-and-goal at the Baltimore 3.

Every Jets fan was thinking one thing at that moment: You try and win the game right there, don’t you, instead of settling for a trip to sudden-death overtime? A 3-step drop, a quick pass, a bootleg pass to the left side of the field – something? – and if that misses, you fall back on the field goal?

Yes, quarterbacks can always be sacked, but Carter’s mobility would seem to have been ideally suited for this situation, enabling him to throw the ball out of bounds or out of the end zone if pressured. Inexplicably, Edwards opted to kick the chip-shot field goal and try his luck in overtime.

In overtime, Edwards made his third bad decision of the game, opting to receive instead of kicking off and trying to trap the Ravens deep in their own territory. After two punt exchanges, on the Ravens’ third possession, Boller finally threw a decent pass, gained 20 yards, and set up the winning field goal.

The Ravens won, but they won’t be going anywhere this year. Despite the constant preaching by former-coaches-turned-analysts about the importance of defense and running, you know that in the first round of the playoffs Baltimore will lose to a team with a good passing game, a team that will force them to play catch-up. As for the Jets, their early-season momentum is gone after Herman Edwards gave a clinic on how to outrun and out pass your opponent on your home field and still coach your team to a loss.