Perfect Yet Flawed: Edwards and Jets Learn to Win Ugly

In the Spice Girls movie – please don’t ask me the title, I only watched it for my daughter’s sake – there is one memorable line. After listening to a replay of their latest song, the Spice Girls’ engineer tells them the record is “absolutely perfect … without actually being very good.”That about describes the Jets’ season up to now. After five games, the Jets have won five games against five teams that, when they were not playing New York, were a collective 6-17. The Jets haven’t been all that impressive in winning, either: They’ve outscored their five mediocre-to-bad opponents by just 31 points.There is one definite thing to be said about these kind of victories, namely that they beat the hell out of losing. The Jets are getting better, if only in the area of winning the close games that they were losing last year. After the first four games of this season, they were the least penalized team in the league, which is always a good sign; they also lead the league in time of possession, which in and of itself doesn’t mean much, but is at least a sign that they have an offensive game plan.Yesterday, against one of the league’s worst teams, the San Francisco 49ers, the Jets gave a clinic on how to win ugly. Though the final margin of eight points was close to the pregame spread, they came within one good pass and a long field goal of losing.With about 2 minutes to go and the Jets leading 15-14, punter Toby Gowin dropped an ugly 27-yard wounded seagull on the San Francisco 35-yard line. With three timeouts and plenty of time to work into position for a game-winning field goal, 49ers’ quarterback Tim Rattay – who had had a terrific day up to that point, completing 18 of 27 passes for 286 yards and no interceptions – decided, for no apparent reason, to throw a short pass into the hands of Jets rookie linebacker Jonathan Vilma. Sometimes, as Branch Rickey said, luck is the residue of design; sometimes, luck is just luck.Jets head coach Herman Edwards certainly deserves a little luck. The Jets were 10-6 in his first season, 2001, and by the end of the 2002 regular season, they seemed like one of the best teams in the AFL. Though they lost to the Super Bowl-bound Oakland Raiders in the second round of the playoffs, the Jets were many experts’ picks to win the AFC in 2003.With Herman Edwards’s talent for developing defensive players and Chad Pennington (who many were comparing to Joe Montana) to put points on the board, the Jets looked like team of the future in the AFC.But Pennington’s preseason injury derailed the Jets, and they never got back on track, finishing 6-10 last year. Fans were willing to give Edwards the benefit of the doubt, but that benefit would not stretch beyond this season if Edwards rolled the dice and let go of popular veterans Marvin Jones and Mo Lewis, gambling that the Class of 2000 -Pennington, defensive ends John Abraham and Shaun Ellis, and tight end Anthony Becht – could carry the team. When 2001 pick Santana Moss blossomed into one of the league’s most dangerous receivers, Edwards finally seemed to have the right pieces in place.Yesterday against San Francisco, it seemed in the early stages of the game as if bad luck had once again caught up with the Jets. Or maybe they were already looking ahead to next week’s clash with the Patriots.Without Moss, the team’s only legitimate deep threat – through his first four games, he was averaging a defense stretching 21 yards per catch – the Jets played too conservatively and sluggishly on both sides of the football and found themselves down 14-3. Fox play-by-play man Bill Rosen summed up the performance well, “They’re not showing much emotion, they’re not adjusting, and most of all, they’re not attacking.”The 49ers had managed two first-half touchdown drives by constantly surprising the Jets on third-down situations, running three, four, and finally five wide receiver sets, which left Jets defensive coordinator Donnie Henderson shaking his head on the sideline.In the second half, Henderson wisely decided to stop trying to outguess the desperate 49ers turn loose the pass rush. This netted the Jets three sacks and several “hurries,” including a key third-down tackle by Abraham, who skirted around his blocker in three quick strides and brought down Rattay late in the fourth quarter.By this time, the Jets’ young and talented secondary was flexing its muscle, jamming the 49ers receivers and giving the pass rushers an extra second to get to Rattay. But, as Fox color man Bill Maas shrewdly observed, “You wonder why it was necessary to make that adjustment at halftime.”Why, indeed? Edwards, like most head coaches with reputations as “defense-minded,” is a sound fundamentalist who “coaches out” – to use Bear Bryant’s phrase – a lot of mistakes; for the fifth straight game, the Jets’ opponents had more penalties and fumbles than they did. But in trying to avoid mistakes, Edwards has a distressing tendency to become overly conservative, coaching down to the level of his opponents.The Jets’ talent was obviously superior to San Francisco’s, but they often seemed reluctant to use their best weapons. On defense, Abraham and Ellis spent far too much of the first half sticking close to the line of scrimmage on 3rd-and-long, as if the Jets were afraid the 49ers would beat them by running draw plays. But by the first defensive series of the third quarter, the Jets made the necessary adjustment and simply fired into the San Francisco backfield, disrupting nearly every play.On offense, though, Edwards and offensive coordinator Paul Hackett refused to cut Pennington loose on first down when a big pass might have broken things open for the Jets. Curtis Martin got his usual 100+ yards rushing, while 14 of Pennington’s 30 passes came on 3rd-and-4 or longer situations where the 49ers defense was better prepared to stop him.“Ugly wins are a beautiful thing,” Maas said at the game’s end, and Jets fans certainly agreed. But by going unbeaten through five games, Edwards has created expectations that may not be satisfied by anything less than a trip to the Super Bowl. The first serious step on that route takes the Jets to Foxboro, Mass., next week. The Jets don’t have to win that game; their schedule continues to be pretty soft up to their second meeting with the Patriots in the next-to-last game of the season at the Meadowlands. That game, however, they almost certainly will have to win.

Perfect Yet Flawed: Edwards and Jets Learn to Win Ugly

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