GREEN BAY, Wis. — If you are lucky — and I use that term both loosely and ironically — then perhaps you go back to the originator, to the Heidi Game. Maybe you didn't realize it then — the Jets did go on to win the Super Bowl seven weeks later, after all — but that was the start of something. Call it an ill wind. Call it a dark cloud.
Call it Indi-Jets-ion.
But you know it's there, always lurking. Players come, players go. Coaches, executives, PR flacks — they come, they swear there is no such wind, no such cloud, they sneer at the sheer silliness of it all, they go. And yet every few years, you get Mark Gastineau hitting Bernie Kosar late. You get a Fake Spike. You get a buttfumble.
And you get a defensive tackle — keep that part of it in mind please; a DEFENSIVE tackle — calling a timeout while the offense is on the field, a few seconds before the quarterback throws what would have been a game-tying 36-yard touchdown pass.
"It's my fault," Sheldon Richardson said.
The kid was being too hard on himself, really. It's bigger than that. It's bigger than him. Richardson was still at Missouri when the buttfumble happened. He wasn't yet 5 when the Fake Spike happened, wasn't yet born when Gastineau crushed Kosar.
The Jets lost to the Packers 31-24 yesterday for a lot of reasons, almost none of them Richardson's fault: the offense, so brilliant early, crawled into a shell across the final 2 ¹/₂ quarters. Nobody thought it worthwhile to guard Jordy Nelson, who collected 209 receiving yards. Aaron Rodgers, best quarterback on the planet, did things the best quarterback on the planet is supposed to do.
So there was that.
But there was also this: An interception by David Harris late in the third quarter that could well have rescued the Jets and reversed an avalanche of bad momentum, called back because Damon "Snacks" Harrison was maybe a half-step away from the sidelines (and digging hard) when Rodgers snapped the ball. Penalty. Twelve men on the field.
An ill wind.
And there was this: The Jets facing fourth-and-4 at the Green Bay 36, down a touchdown, all 78,041 inside Lambeau on their feet, roaring, screeching, pleading, and Smith somehow, someway, finding Jeremy Kerley for the tying score, and …
"In my peripheral vision," Kerley admitted, "I saw something."
"You can tell when a play's coming back," receiver David Nelson said.
A dark cloud.
It's there on the tape: Rex Ryan standing next to Richardson and then Richardson approaching the line judge. What you can also see is offensive coordinator Marty Mornhinweg waving his arms as if to say: "No!"
Referees are only supposed to grant timeouts to the head coach, but they're also instructed to keep their eyes on the line of scrimmage so close to a snap. What he heard was Richardson's voice. Who's message was he relaying?
"I know for a fact it didn't come from me," Ryan said.
Mornhinweg isn't permitted to offer his take until later in the week because the Jets would prefer this story linger an extra four or five days.
Richardson? "I let the team down," he said.
No. He didn't. In the small picture, he was well down the list of Sunday's culprits. Muhammad Wilkerson showed an appalling lack of judgment and poise by getting himself tossed for throwing a punch as the meltdown climaxed with a two-point conversion that gave the Packers their first lead, 24-21. Geno Smith was a completely different player over the game's final 40 minutes than he was in the first 20, in part because it looked like Mornhinweg traded in his own playbook at halftime for a dusty copy of Paul Hackett's assemblage of squiggly lines.
And Ryan, now in his sixth year, has to find a way to stop the hemorrhaging, and instead of applying a tourniquet he let his team bleed out.
In the bigger picture? Richardson never had a chance. He was just another naive newcomer who thought the Jets' history of hilarity was a fable, a fairy tale, something made up by fans and seized by sportswriters, except if you've been paying attention long enough, all the way back to a Swiss lass named Heidi, then you know this merits a proper place in the anthology.
You know Indi-Jets-ion when you see it.
And feel it.
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