Individually, they really have merited better. There are some good, talented people working for the Jets who don't deserve to have a 3-13 or a 4-12 slipped into their permanent record by this time next week.
We have seen Rex Ryan grow up as a head coach, from a spewer of bellicose bluster to someone who truly seems to understand and appreciate the opportunity he has had with the Jets — and bemoans the opportunities lost.
Geno Smith will never be Aaron Rodgers — and sometimes his weekly oaths of accountability can sound like a child who keeps apologizing for forgetting to take out the trash every week — but the truth is his willingness to acknowledge shortcomings is a refreshing change of pace from the usual who-me? line of athletic defense.
Then there is Nick Mangold, whose season probably ended in a heap in the second half of Sunday's 17-16 loss to the Patriots, who walked out of MetLife Stadium on crutches, wearing a boot, but who walked onto the turf a few hours earlier wearing an NYPD hat, saluting the two officers who were murdered in Brooklyn a day earlier.
"We don't know whether our careers will end with one play on the field," Mangold said softly. "And you magnify that when you realize police officers go to work and live with the question of whether this might be their last day on earth."
Yes, there are many Jets who deserve better than this epic fail of a season, and if you'd like you can point across the field and wonder how, in an allegedly just world, the football gods allow the surly coach, Bill Belichick, to win year after year, or how the perfect quarterback with the supermodel wife isn't given the occasional comeuppance, or how the tight end who has now posed with both strippers and kittens in his career has emerged as some kind of football superhero, and how year after year, season after season, the Patriots manage to torture the Jets …
"They're the team everybody tries to measure up against," Mangold said. "And I think we match up with them as well as anyone, and we play well against them a lot of the time, and …"
He didn't finish the thought. He didn't have to. The simple truth is this: The Patriots will always be Moby Dick for the Jets until they figure out a way to catch them, and then surpass them, and then keep them down. The laws of probability insist that has to happen at some point, but when?
"That's been the story," Ryan said glumly. "They find ways to win. That's why they are where they are."
It's deeper than that, though. The psychology of this rivalry will always run deeper than that. The Jets and Pats were harmless neighbors for most of the first 35 years of their shared existence. Then the Jets stole Bill Parcells, who was very much under contract with the Patriots, who was in the middle of coaching them to the Super Bowl in fact.
Is this the worst karmic crime ever committed? You wouldn't think so. But it certainly seemed to hack off some celestial football deities. Belichick ransom-noted the Jets a few days after taking the job. Of all teams, it was the Jets (in the person of Mo Lewis) who nearly snapped Drew Bledsoe in two, inviting Tom Brady to take his first few steps on the road to Canton.
And it gets worse: The three Super Bowls, the 12 AFC East titles since 2001 — "They run away with our division every year," Ryan said, stating it as a point of historical certainty, same as you'd say, "George Washington was the father of our country." And even the two times the Pats were brought to their knees? It was the GIANTS who put them there. What could possibly inspire a Jets fan to root for the Giants? The GIANTS?
Only the Patriots could do that.
Yes, it has been a special brand of torture for Al Groh, for Herman Edwards, for Eric Mangini, for Rex Ryan and for whoever will be in charge going forward, all the coaches who have operated in the dueling Belichick shadows: the one cast all the way from Foxborough, and the ghostly one that still inhabits the Jets themselves.
Ryan, of course, has suffered more than any of them. He vowed to not kiss Belichick's rings and he hasn't. He has a playoff win. He has as many wins over the Pats as anyone in the East since he started (the division's tallest midget!). And this year, by rights, he could have twice beaten the odds-on favorite to represent the AFC in the Super Bowl. Could have.
"We're the team that gives him the biggest challenge," Ryan said of Tom Brady, "even if he wouldn't admit it."
They do. But Brady has more often returned the favor by delivering the most intense heartache Ryan has known. One more time, Sunday, it was Brady taking the knee at the end. One more time close wasn't close enough. Soon enough, it'll be someone else's indigestion.
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