A quick link to all of my work at the FanHouse today:
Jets Woes Go Well Beyond Pennington
Bears Owe Ed Hochuli a Game Ball
Running Away From McGahee Costs Ravens was quickly followed by McGahee Was Dehydrated Not Ignored by Billick Yesterday
Price Check on Dontrelle Willis
Pretty big game for the Jets this weekend. The Eagles, not exactly setting the world on fire themselves, are coming to town and Chad Pennington's fighting for his job and, perhaps, his future with the Jets. I discussed this weekend's matchup and a lot more with Brian Bassett of the always excellent The Jets Blog for his weekly podcast which you can listen to right here and I previewed the game over at the FanHouse.
Quick and dirty, things don't look good for the Jets. The Eagles have Brian Westbrook and Gang Green can't stop the run while the Eagles have a pretty decent defense and the Jets have, well, very little to offer offensively. At least they'll look sharp in their throwback unis. Yep, that's what the Jets will be wearing this weekend. Scoff if you will but the Eagles put up 56 points in their old-school duds so maybe there's something to turning back the clock.
New England 38, San Diego 14 - Whoever said that cheaters never prosper never met Bill Belichick. Coming off a week that saw him fined $500,000 and his team stripped of a draft choice, Belichick first received a contract extension and then a hero's welcome by the hometown crowd at the outset of last night's game with the Chargers. His team responded to all of the chaos by laying another beating on an AFC rival and further establishing themselves as the team to beat in the conference. Taking the talent of the Patriots and adding in the fury of a woman scorned is a dangerous combination indeed for the NFL. Dangerous for the Chargers is a second poor outing for Philip Rivers and the sneaking suspicion that they may have missed their last, best chance at making it to the Super Bowl against these same Patriots in the playoffs last season.
Houston 34, Carolina 21 - What a difference a quarterback makes. Matt Schaub spent more time slinging passes to Andre Johnson than staring at the clouds and the Texans are 2-0. They've got a good little defense, too. They forced three turnovers and sacked Jake Delhomme three times to help overcome a 14-0 first quarter deficit. The Panthers need to work on holding onto the ball and the defense could use an upgrade but Delhomme and Steve Smith need no remedial work. They hooked up for all three Panther touchdowns.
Cleveland 51, Cincinnati 45 - Message to Chad Johnson: Don't tempt the powers of karma by leaping into the opposing team's stands after you score a touchdown. Message to Cincinnati defensive coordinator Chuck Bresnahan: You need to do a better job. Message to Derek Anderson: Job very well done. Message to Jamal Lewis: Welcome back!
Jacksonville 13, Atlanta 7 - David Garrard threw for 272 yards and a touchdown and the Jags sacked Joey Harrington seven times. They also committed 11 penalties and needed two missed field goals to escape with a win against a terrible Falcons team, which is what we in the business call bad omens of future success.
Indianapolis 22, Tennessee 20 - The Titans blueprint for this season is pretty clear. Run the ball behind a talented offensive line all day long and let Vince Young take care of anything else. It worked in Week One and nearly did the trick against the Colts on Sunday but the Indy defense stiffened late and held off the last-ditch rally.
San Francisco 17, St. Louis 16 - Remember when Dante Hall was one of the most explosive weapons in the NFL? You'll have to because now he's a guy who fumbles punts in the fourth quarter and sets up the game-winning field goal for the opposition. Frank Gore bailed out another crap performance from Alex Smith with 81 yards and two touchdowns but the Niners need to find a passing game if they want to keep winning games.
Green Bay 35, Giants 13 - Those of us in New York were thrilled to find the Giants on Fox for the early game on Sunday afternoon. Check that, we were dismayed, depressed and searching for any other way to spend the day especially once the fourth quarter began. The Pack blew open a 14-13 game with three fourth-quarter touchdowns against a team that quit playing. That sound you hear is Tom Coughlin's resume getting updated.
Pittsburgh 26, Buffalo 3 - The Steelers did what they were supposed to do to a team playing with a skeleton defense and a heavy heart after Kevin Everett's injury. If they keep this up against teams that aren't from Buffalo and Cleveland we'll start getting excited.
Tampa Bay 31, New Orleans 14 - Was Joe Horn really the reason why the Saints had the most explosive offense in the NFL last season? He was the only significant departure from the roster but seems to have taken all of the firepower to Atlanta with him. It should be noted that the Falcons don't have any firepower so perhaps it's some kind of chemical reaction that needs both Horn and the Saints together but whatever the case the pressure is mounting on Bourbon Street.
Arizona 23, Seattle 20 - Arizona blew another huge lead and was staring at another Neil Rackers field goal from the hash to try and pull out a win. In the Chicago game that effectively ended Dennis Green's tenure, Rackers missed and the Bears won. Yesterday, however, Rackers was true from 42 yards out and the Cardinals pulled out a big divisional victory.
Dallas 37, Miami 20 - The Cowboys offense continued unabated and the defense showed a little more steel than they did against the Giants. Unless the old Wade Phillips rears its ugly head the 'Boys are going to be one of the toughest teams to beat in all of football.
Detroit 20, Minnesota 17 - The Vikings defense is no joke. Tarvaris Jackson is a huge joke, though, and that's the difference between being 2-0 and 1-1. On the Lions side as long as Jon Kitna is in the game they have a chance to win but when he's out, as he was for most of Sunday's contest, J.T. O'Sullivan isn't able to keep the offense humming.
Baltimore 20, Jets 13 - So glad that the Jets found the money to keep Justin McCareins on the team but weren't able to scrape together a couple of nickels for Pete Kendall.
Denver 23, Oakland 20 - The Raiders need to play 60 minutes of football, stop worrying about when the other guy calls a timeout and figure out if Josh McCown is hurt or just a bad quarterback, in that order.
Chicago 20, Kansas City 10 - What a difference a year doesn't make - Bears defense and special teams win a game because Rex Grossman isn't able to get out of his own way.
(AP Photo/Winslow Townson)
If you're wondering where today's recap of the Jets 20-13 loss in Baltimore is, I invite you to head over to the FanHouse where I've just completed my first weekend as a writer. I'm covering the Jets as well as the Ravens, Broncos and Bears and am excited to be part of such a talented group of writers on one of the best sports blogs on these here internets. It does mean that there will be less coverage of Gang Green on these pages but you can be sure that no stone will be left unturned when it comes to bringing all the news and views that are fit to print on the pages of my new employer. Hope to see you there and as a taste of what you can find here are yesterday's recaps.
Ravens Hold On When Comeback Slips Through Jet Fingers
One way or the other we're going to find out what kind of football team the Jets are this weekend. Last week's game was a mess on both sides of the field but the combination of superior talent and espionage make it hard to know how much that has to do with the Patriots and how much it has to do with Gang Green. Is the pass rush really as feeble as it looked last weekend? Are the defensive backs as impotent? Can the offensive line really be that much worse for the loss of Pete Kendall? My initial feelings on these questions are two optimistic no's and an emphatic yes. That yes may have cost them Chad Pennington for this weekend's action and could get whoever ends up starting at quarterback killed against the Ravens.
That defense almost won Monday's opener all by itself for Baltimore but even their greatness couldn't overcome six turnovers and an awful pass-interference call on Todd Heap that cost the Ravens most of their scoring chances. Steve McNair may not be able to play on Sunday after sustaining his regular buffet of injuries although it's hard to judge how much of an edge that might give Mangini's minions. Kyle Boller resembled Kyle Boller but the Ravens, who are also missing Jonathan Ogden, aren't likely to open up the offense any more than necessary. Still, without Ogden and without much offensive flow the Jets should be able to challenge the Ravens offense if last week's miscues were caused by the Patriots. The Bengals got a lot of pressure last weekend and held Willis McGahee in check for the most part, if the Jets can't do the same it's going to be a long, long season.
The uncertainty at quarterback is going to hurt the Jets either way. If Pennington starts he will be at less than 100% and if it's Clemens, and I expect it will be, then you're basically throwing a three-year old in the deep end to see if he can swim. Maybe he can but more likely he drowns under the onslaught of Rex Ryan's aggressive game plan. It would be nice if Thomas Jones came up with a big game to take some pressure off whoever was throwing the ball but the Ravens line is both strong and fast, a combination that should be fatal to the leaky unit the Jets employ up front. I don't like the Jets chances to turn things around this week and even with a ten point spread I can't see betting against BALTIMORE.
As the football world waits for the NFL's decision about punishment for New England's extracurricular videotaping on Sunday the Jets are doing their best to concentrate on the game ahead. In a way all of the attention being paid to Videogate is helping them escape media scrutiny of the way they actually played in the 38-14 loss. Most notably they are avoiding questions about the price they weren't willing to pay to protect Chad Pennington. Eric Mangini's meetings with the press have focused on the Patriots and, to a lesser extent, Pennington's injury but he hasn't faced much grilling about the decision to trade Pete Kendall instead of giving him a $1,000,000 raise.
The team's general manager, Mike Tannenbaum, did address the decision and stood by it.
“I understand we have to be accountable for our decisions,” Tannenbaum said last night by telephone. “We don’t shirk them.” He added: “We’re comfortable with the value we received when we traded Pete. I said that at the time, and nothing has changed.”
Whatever the NFL decides about the Patriots there isn't going to be any direct benefit to the Jets. They aren't going to forfeit the second game between the teams to the Jets nor are they going to move it to the Meadowlands which means that the team needs to redouble their efforts to fix the onfield problems. Adrian Clarke was terrible on Sunday, the rookie Jacob Bender probably isn't ready to do a much better job and if Pennington is able to play this Sunday he will be doing so at risk of suffering a much more devastating injury than last week's rolled ankle. The Newark Star-Ledger reports that he won't be in the pocket but that just means that Kellen Clemens, the future at quarterback, will be under assault because the Jets didn't do what was necessary to keep their offensive line at full strength.
It's time to move on from the ancillary story of Sunday's loss and move on to the main one. The Jets need to be much better than they were last week to avoid an 0-2 start that would be disastrous to their playoff hopes.
Joshua Prager wrote a book about The Shot Heard Round The World last year called The Echoing Green. The book grew out of an article he wrote for the Wall Street Journal that revealed that it wasn't just Bobby Thompson's quick bat or Ralph Branca's meatball that accounted for the home run that brought the Giants the 1951 pennant. Prager did some fine detective work and revealed that the Giants had stashed someone with a spyglass in centerfield at the Polo Grounds to steal signs and relay them, via the scoreboard, to their hitters. It's an important twist to the story since that moment remains one of baseball's most vivid, giving birth to the most memorable radio call of all time as well as the best opening to a book ever, not Prager's but Don DeLillo's Underworld.
DeLillo isn't likely to send an older Cotter Martin to Sunday's Patriots-Jets game for the opening of his next novel but if he was it looks like he would have been present for two tainted contests. Word out of NFL offices is that Roger Goodell has determined that the Patriots did illegally videotape the Jets during Sunday's game. What seemed like a far-fetched joke yesterday has become very real.
NFL security officials confiscated a camera and videotape from Patriots video assistant Matt Estrella on the New England sidelines when it was suspected he was recording the Jets' defensive signals. Sources say the visual evidence confirmed the suspicion.
Goodell is considering severe sanctions, including the possibility of docking the Patriots "multiple draft picks" because it is the competitive violation in the wake of a stern warning to all teams since he became commissioner, the sources said. The Patriots have been suspected in previous incidents.
The Patriots will be allowed an opportunity to present their case by Friday, sources said, most likely via the telephone.
NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said on Tuesday that no official decision has been made and that the club has not been notified.
The league also was reviewing a possible violation into the number of radio frequencies the Patriots were using during Sunday's game, sources said. The team did not have a satisfactory explanation when asked about possible irregularities in its communication setup during the game.
Frankly, if this is true the stripping of draft picks doesn't seem like a harsh enough punishment. It's hard to separate the heart from the head here but if the Patriots gained one yard because they knew what defense the Jets were going to run they deserve to get the win stripped from their record. So would the Jets if they did the same thing to someone else, not that I believe they'd be smart enough to pull something like this off in a million years. This isn't Tedy Bruschi recognizing the QB's audibles or Tom Brady picking up on tendencies. Nor is it even studying the tape of a game after its over to analyze the signs or signals being sent. If you aren't smart enough to change up your calls against a team you've played multiple times then you deserve to get your ass kicked but every team deserves to feel secure in the belief that they aren't being spied on during the game itself. Not that I really understand what the Pats gained from the treachery. There are enough legal eyes on the field and on the other team that using a video camera and radioing back signals smacks of overkill of the highest order. If the league finds it so unconscionable that it's against the rules, though, it should be treated as a sin of the highest order.
As the ESPN article quoted above states the Patriots don't seem to be strangers to this kind of cheating which makes it strange that the league would just keep letting them get away with it. If this is proven true and the Pats are disciplined by the league for cheating it will, for me anyway, forever tarnish Bill Belichick's legacy as one of the game's brilliant minds. Not that criminal minds can't be brilliant ones but I tend to prefer terms like crafty, conniving and scheming to describe the kinds of people who resort to cheating. All of those times when announcers would shake their head in disbelief about how smart the Hooded Hoodwinker is and how he seems to always guess right about what the opposition is going to run. I wonder if they'll change their tune now that we know that he probably did know what they were going to run.
The Patriots aren't actually strangers to any kind of cheating. Back in 1982 they employed a convict on work release as a tractor driver during a game against the Miami Dolphins. The game was in December during a classic Noreaster and late in the fourth quarter neither team had beaten the elements long enough to score any points. The Pats had gotten close enough to kick a field goal, at least they would be close enough if it wasn't for the piles of snow on the field but Ron Meyer wasn't going to let a little thing like fair play get in the way of that. He called the tractor, equipped with a snow sweeper, onto the field, a courtesy that wasn't extended to the Dolphins, and cleared a spot for kicker John Smith to use for the only points in the game.
The Jets didn't clarify anything about their starting quarterback situation yesterday so we don't yet know for sure if Kellen Clemens will make his first NFL start in Baltimore on Sunday. If he does that should make more than a handful of Jets fans happy. That greeted his entrance with a lusty cheer isn't so awful on its face, they were looking for something good to happen in a game that was destined for disaster. The implication of those cheers, though, is pretty awful.
Jets fans have always spent more time worrying about the things that Chad Pennington couldn't do than enjoying the things that he could do as the signal caller. There are really only two things that Chad hasn't been able to pull off in his Jets career and those are throwing deep and staying healthy. The latter is hard to give him too much grief about. It's not like his injuries have come from a lack of conditioning or a propensity to do stupid things that led to injuries. No, they've come because the Jets have often played offensive lines that couldn't block and those choices have led to brutal hits that rattled Pennington's bones until they shattered. Not every quarterback can have the durability of Brett Favre and no matter how frustrating injuries can be you can't blame a NFL player for succumbing to the maelstrom of violence that is professional football.
Not every quarterback can throw the ball like Favre either. It's important to remember how much this reason for hatred ties into the first one, though. When Pennington first came to the Jets and first entered the lineup he could throw the ball deep. It wasn't always the prettiest ball but he got it down the field. He didn't get to show off the longball all that often in Paul Hackett's right-wing offense but he had it in his arsenal. Then came the dual shoulder surgeries that forced him to adapt his game to his new physical realities. That's the thing, though, he did adapt his game.
He was a Doug Brien field goal away from beating the eventual Super Bowl champs in Pittsburgh even though he was playing with one arm. He led the Jets to 10 wins and the playoffs last season even though every other team in the league knew that the Jets couldn't throw bombs and couldn't run the ball to save their lives. Think about some other big-armed quarterbacks and ask yourself if they could have been winners without being able to throw the ball deep. Would Drew Bledsoe have ever started a game under those conditions? Maybe but he certainly wouldn't have been the winner that Pennington has been because he doesn't have the Jet quarterback's savvy and leadership abilities.
2008 was no guarantee for Pennington under the best of circumstances. Clemens looks like a player who is worth a shot in the starting lineup and no matter how intelligent a player Pennington is you need to be able to run a full complment of offensive plays. Who knows, maybe Clemens starts this weekend and spurs the Jets the way that Pennington did in 2002 and the Jets march on to the playoffs. That would be sweet and I'll root for Clemens the way I did for Rick Mirer, Ray Lucas and Brooks Bollinger. I would do it with a bit of wistfulness about the end of the line for number 10, though, because his efforts deserve no less from Jet fans.
Those of us who are grasping at straws to explain why the Jets looked so awful against the Patriots at home yesterday get thrown a life preserver from Scout.com's Dan Leberfeld.
According to a Meadowlands source, a member of the Patriots organization, with a credential issued by the team, was spotted by Jets security chief Steve Yarnell shooting near the New York bench.
And according to the stadium source, when questioned by Yarnell, the unnamed individual said that he was put up to it by the Patriots. The cameraman was reportedly accused by Yarnell of shooting the Jets' signals that were being sent by the coaches from the sidelines.
The source says that the NFL is being made aware of this accusation. If this is true, the Patriots could be subject to a serious punishment from the league office.
I don't know what to make of this. On the one hand if the Patriots were doing what's being accused they could pick up something that would help them prepare for such-and-such defensive set or so-and-so audible and would react to it quicker than they normal. They certainly played like they knew just what the Jets were going to do on each and every down. Especially in the second half when a 14-7 game became a full-on rout. You can't really put anything past the Hooded Casanova when it comes to besting his portly protege, either.
On the other hand several of the key plays of the game - the Hobbs kick return and the Moss touchdown come to mind - the Jets just got flat out beat on the field. There didn't appear to be the slightest bit of chicanery going on during those second-half plays nor would any defensive coordinator worth his salt need an Enigma machine to figure out what the Jets were doing on offense. For the record, though, when Eric Mangini orders the penne arrabiata at Nuovo Vesuvio the Jets are running the counter trap.
Leberfeld doesn't say what the punishment would be if the Pats were found guilty of sign-stealing but short of the rematch being the football equivalent of an open book exam for the Jets what could the league do to make it right? I guess they could strip New England of draft picks or fine them but it wouldn't make up for anything that happened on Sunday. Whatever conclusions are drawn by Roger Goodell's goon squad this situation is sure to elevate hostilities between the two franchises.
For anyone interested in self-flagellation, I made good on my bet with JD of the Six Pack Sports Report and wrote a glowing review of his Patriots this morning. You can head over to JD's fine site and read the hardest thing I've ever had to write or I can just summarize it for you right here - the Pats are really, really good and the other 15 clubs in the AFC are going to have an awfully hard time knocking them off their Super Bowl path. I probably didn't go as far as I could have in my praise for yesterday's performance. Everyone is talking about Moss and how his presence makes the Patriots such a dangerous offensive team. Lost in all that talk, true though it is, is how well their offensive line played yesterday. It will be hard to tell if it was a function of the Jets dismal defensive effort or if it was the cause of said dismal effort but I lean toward the latter. The Jets own offensive line woes, however, are nobody's fault but their own.
(AP Photo/Bill Kostroun)
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