Go Jets Ho!

It’s no secret that New Yorkers generally have a love-hate relationship with their sporting team coaches.  Uttering the name of one of these gentlemen in a crowded subway car will usually garner you at least one “He should be fired”’s .  Yet we remain in awe of these chaps and hang on to their every pronouncement as though they were oracles, or even the demigods of sport, capable of moving mountains and delivering our heroes to the promised land.  I needn’t belabor this topic. After all, it can be summed up in one awesomely loved/loathed New York byword: Steinbrenner.

So I would be lying if I told you that I wasn’t both horrified and also a tad bit pleased to see poor Tom Coughlin bulldozed by Giants running back TJ Ware in yesterday’s NY-NY faceoff.  

 But I would also be lying if I told you that I wouldn’t kinda rather have seen Rex Ryan laid out flat under similar circumstances.  It might at least give me the opportunity to feel bad for him.  Because as of right now, I’m pretty ticked off with the old Tyrannosaurus Rex.

I understand that part of Rex Ryan’s bluster is calculated to take the heat off his team.  He doesn’t want to saddle his players with the burden of public scorn that they cannot bear, so he places it upon his own hefty shoulders, going so far as to invite the media mockery.  But there are moments when our Tyrannosaurus Rex just goes too far.

Keep in mind that this is a blog being written by a little sister for her older brother.  I wouldn’t dream of trying to act older/wiser than YM, and I am pretty sure that YM knows better than to try and act bigger in the britches than HM.  We also all know that Mom, in all of her loving fairness and her complete and total equity, cannot help nor be blamed for harboring a secret and inextinguishable torch for HM--the eldest, the tallest, the grandest of the lot.  These are not matters to be disputed nor to be helped.  What we can do within the pecking order is to know our place and do our best within it.

Which is why I take issue with Rex when he tries to pull off this kind of reasoning:

"  There's no way I'm going to be second fiddle. If we were playing the New York Yankees, I don't want to be second fiddle to them. This is the same type of deal. I want to be the best team in football, not just the best team in this city. But we'll start by being the best team in this city….Quite honestly, I never came here to be little brother to anybody.”

The New York Yankeees….whaaaa?!?!  Comments like this leave a person to wonder just how addlepated Ryan actually is, and does he even know what sport his team is playing??!  The fact is that the opening moments of yesterday’s match revealed that the Jets were, in fact, the better team on the field.  I’m willing to go that far, having reveled in the sparkling display of Jets D that looked so spot on in the opening twenty minutes of the match. That alone could, should, have set us up for the win. 

It seems to me that it was just plain bad coaching at the helm that drove us into the ditch, and left us, the better team on yesterday’s field, to consider the bleak prospects of 5% chances.  That’s just not a number that I can take to the bank. I live in Harlem, and I know some Five Percenters who think that makes them legit.   

But I guess I’ll reserve my opinion on that for another blog.