I remember after the 1998-1999 season, after blowing a lead and losing the AFC Championship game to John Elway...I thought "great season...we'll be back next year even better." 11 Years later...I have learned from the past, and will only say that in THIS sport...in THIS day and age...you have to take whatever chance you get to reach the Superbowl, because year in and year out - anything can happen to derail your season. We lost Testaverde in the first game of the 1999-2000 season and the rest is history. Can all our guys stay healthy next season and build from this season? Of course, and I pray they do. But it could also be another 11 years before we get this chance again...so please excuse me while I mourn this loss, and I hope nobody tells me I shouldn't - regardless of how optimistic you are.
Those thoughts kicked in as soon as we jumped out to the 11 point lead. I was thinking 1) this is too good to be true and 2) it's way too early. Only way that this deviated from the script was that we didn't have 6 TO's.
Well I thought of the 98 Championship game. How could you not? We had a 10-0 halftime lead in that one. And today an 11-point lead at the half vanishes like a fart in the wind.
Your right on with that one. While we have a very nice core, what seems to be a very good HC, and two rookies who are the real deal you never know what will happen. Should the Jets be very good next year? Sure but like you said look at 1999.
Same here, when we went up 11 i said this aint happening. Then 50 seconds later they scored a TD. Tough loss but its not like where not use to it, it was a nice ride.
yeah anything can happen in football...but fuck that. I still dont consider thsi the same old jets. Unless Sanchez gets a season ending injury on week 1 next season....
Elway and Favre are probably the best comparisons for Sanchez at this point. Odds are he'll wind up on the next plateau down, but that's still a hell of a QB.
I hear you. I'm bitterly disappointed as well. In the playoffs, regardless of how you got there, there is only winning and misery, and the deeper the go, the greater the misery is if you don't make it all the way. You are certainly correct that the NFL is an unpredictable league and that the window of opportunity to win is often extremely small. We all expected big things from the Jets in '99-'00, and it all fell apart about 5 minutes into the season when Vinny's achilles snapped. However, I will say that I feel this is different now versus '98. We have a great core of young players, a quarterback who is looking like he could be a franchise QB (instead of a career-mediocre QB who happened to have a career year) who is now playoff battle-tested, good ownership and team management, and a very good HC who players will run through walls for and who will actually be here for a while, rather than Parcells who made a career out of bailing on his teams. A few moves in the offseason should improve us on both sides of the ball.
The difference is in the '98 title game we killed ourselves w/ turnovers, Elway wasn't great, while in this game Manning was great and the Colts were clearly the better team.
