Jets Patriots Highs and Lows

FOXBORO, Mass. — Strange and curious vibe in the Jets’ locker room after Sunday’s deflating 30-21 loss to the Patriots, a team New York beat here at Gillette Stadium in the AFC playoffs not quite nine months ago. To be sure, you could tell the Jets lost this game, but there was a lot of energy spent on finding silver linings in the defeat, and that just doesn’t mesh very well with the image of the bold and brash New Yorkers of the three-year Rex Ryan coaching era.

The Jets (2-3) are on a three-game losing streak, they’re already two full games behind the co-leading Patriots and Bills (both 4-1) in the AFC East, and their oft-stated preseason goal of winning the division and entering the postseason with a top seed and home playoff games to look forward to seems in jeopardy before mid-October has arrived. So what gives with the glass-half-full approach? This is a franchise that sets the bar extremely high and never backs away from the big talk, and it sounds almost hollow when its players attempt to do so.

“Knowing how good this [Patriots] team is playing here, I think you get some encouragement by making some plays, as far as in the running game and offensively,” Jets running back LaDainian Tomlinson offered. “I don’t think we turned the ball over, so that’s something to be encouraged by.”

Then came cornerback Darrelle Revis, trying his hand at some optimism: “We did do some great things, but also we did things to hurt us. We’ve got to correct some things, but [Ryan] did like some of the consistency we had.”

And Plaxico Burress too was reading from the same piece of choir music: “We wanted to come out and run the football at them, which we did,” Burress pointed out. “Shonn [Greene] did a really good job of running the football and hitting the holes, and the offensive line did a great job of opening up the holes for him. But at the end of the day, we just didn’t execute the plays that we needed to execute. You have to be encouraged, and have to take away some of the good things we did today. But at the end of the day, we didn’t score enough points.”