And now that the Jets are dead, it’s time to begin where too many Jets seasons seem to end: with second guesses and prescriptions for better luck in the future.

Getting Favre was the right move. In a results-oriented town like New York, the risks that pay off are branded “genius” while those that don’t are castigated. But if yesterday marked Brett Favre’s final game in a Jets uniform, then the decision to bring him here deserves a fairer consideration than it figures to receive.

Four and a half months ago, the Jets had a unique opportunity to replace a brittle, underperforming player with the foremost quarterback of his generation. It was a move that the Jets had to make. They had gone to war with Pennington for six seasons, and they had two playoff wins to show for it. It wasn’t good enough. Everyone acknowledged that—even Pennington. So after a dismal 2007 campaign that saw him bothered by yet another debilitating injury, Pennington had worn out his welcome here. It was simply time to go, and the opportunity to land Favre merely underscored the need to move on. That Pennington has gone on to outperform Favre this year is largely irrelevant.

What he’s done in Miami is no indication of what he would have done in New York. And if any Jets fans find themselves wondering what would have become of this season had the Jets kept Pennington, they need only look at the last six years to have their answer. Last year, Pennington played terribly as captain of an offense with far more talent than the group with which he has enjoyed so much success in Miami.

Even now, with the Jets dead and the Dolphins preparing for a home playoff game, the Jets offensive personnel are clearly superior to that in place for the Dolphins. Were the two teams combined, it seems a fair bet that Jerricho Cotchery and Laveranues Coles would start at wide receiver; Thomas Jones, at running back; Dustin Keller, at tight end.

That Pennington has flourished with also-rans after failing with relative stars is a glaring indictment of the coaching staff; there’s simply no other way around it. Offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer has gotten less out of more than perhaps any other coordinator in football. He had two good receivers, two Pro Bowl running backs, two Pro Bowl offensive linemen, an excellent young tight end and a Hall of Fame quarterback. There’s simply no excuse for what has happened this year. Suggestions that Favre was somehow too old to make it work are nonsense; you don’t throw six touchdown passes in a game, beat the Patriots in New England or destroy a 10-0 team on its home field if you don’t have it physically. It just didn’t work out. And for that, the coach is to blame.

The Jets organization was right to bid adieu to Mangini shortly after the loss to Miami. The team fans witnessed over the last five weeks was not simply bad; it was out of control, even somewhat disinterested at times.

For some reason that may never be known, Eric Mangini lost this team after a landmark win in Tennessee, and he never got it back. What’s worse, he never tried. Coordinators Bob Sutton and Brian Schottenheimer needed to be shown the door after a humiliating road loss to the 49ers that saw the Jets fall to 8-5. They had lost two in a row by 10 points or more, and it was plain to everyone that Sutton and Schottenheimer were not getting through to their respective units.

Perhaps it would have been impractical to fire both, but certainly at least one—particularly Sutton—ought to have been shown the door. After all, Eric Mangini’s pedigree was in defense. Further, his specialty lay in coaching the secondary, where the Jets were experiencing their greatest problems. It seemed a fairly small leap to suggest that he could replace Sutton without a hitch. If nothing else, a change would have sent a message, putting the team on notice that there was a consequence for failure.

Instead, Mangini did nothing. He was content simply to repeat his tiresome rhetoric about consistency and execution. Now he's gone, and his trust in those around him was his undoing.

Doubtless, Schottenheimer and Sutton were underqualified for their positions and never should have been hired in the first place, but that alone did not doom the Jets. In the end, it was Mangini’s failure to place his own stamp on this team that has caused his failure in New York. An NFL season is long and fraught with many unforeseen twists. It calls not only for a calculating tactician but also for a pragmatist, for adaptation, for a coach who can adjust in midstream to address the many different challenges that inevitably arise over the course of five months. Instead, Mangini has been too heavily invested in his own propaganda to make the changes that had to be made to save the Jets.

Credit GM Mike Tannenbaum. The ax that fell on Mangini should spare Tannenbaum, whose offseason moves and deft management of the salary cap gave the Jets a chance to win in 2008. A year ago at this time, as the Jets had just completed a horrific 4-12 season. By all appearances, the team was in store for yet another rebuilding process. Tannenbaum charted a daring course through free agency while engineering several high-profile trades, including the acquisition of Kris Jenkins and Brett Favre. It was a perilous route to be certain and one that few would have taken. The moves worked. They catapulted the Jets from doormats to contenders.

Say goodbye to Favre. Watching Brett Favre in a Jets uniform has been a great thrill for many fans. But as is the case with Mangini, it’s time to move on. Although Favre could probably play another season or two in the right circumstances, it seems doubtful that he’d be willing to learn yet another offense in the likely event that Schottenheimer is fired. As has been so well documented over the course of this season, Favre is not keen on changing systems, and if the Jets’ offensive system needs anything, it’s change. Schottenheimer’s San Diego system has been a disaster. The quarterbacks who have left it, whether it’s Drew Brees or Chad Pennington, have gone on to perform far better in other places. Besides, Favre will turn 40 next season, and if offseason tests reveal the existence of any damage to his throwing shoulder, his most famous asset may well become a thing of the past.

The Jets have two young quarterbacks in Kellen Clemens and Brett Ratliff. Clemens has been underwhelming in his brief stints as the starter, but he’s still just 25 years old. Moreover, it’s worth noting that Drew Brees’ first two years under Schottenehimer’s tutelage saw him manage 28 touchdowns to 31 interceptions en route to being labeled a draft bust. The Jets also have 23-year-old Brett Ratliff, whose considerable size and cannon arm played to rave reviews in the preseason.

It’s time to move on. Again.

The blame game will doubtless start with an overanalysis of yesterday's humiliating loss to a 3-11 Seattle Seahawks team so ravaged by injury that it was without either its starting quarterback or a single starter on the offensive line. There will be talk of bad calls, missed opportunities, the decision to kick a field goal on fourth down and one from the Seahawks' two-yard line on the game's opening drive, to punt after a five-yard penalty negated a 45-yard Jay Feely kick early in the fourth quarter, the decision to go for it on fourth down and four from their own 20 with 2:21 remaining in the game, and, of course, the Jets' continuing inability to win on the West Coast. These are red herrings. The truth is that the Jets' implosion has had relatively little to do with yesterday's mail-in performance against the Seahawks. This self-destruction has been weeks in the making.

Their wins at New England and Tennessee conclusively established that the Jets have the talent to beat any team in the league. Seven pro-bowl nominations seconded the proposition. But for over a month, the Jets have been sabotaged from within, being glaringly out-coached in nearly every facet of the game. And for over a month, Eric Mangini has been unable or unwilling to stem the tide, choosing instead to stand behind coordinators Brian Schottenheimer and Bob Sutton, both of whom have extracted precious little from relatively talent-laden squads. Their game plans have given the team no strategic advantage in the first half of games, and their halftime adjustments, if there have been any, have changed nothing. More bad run defense, more bad pass defense, more inane, self-defeating offensive play-calling.

As a result, the Jets have been tanking for four weeks. They are 1-3 in their last four games, and only a miraculous end to last week's near-disaster against the Bills has saved them from being 0-4 since their landmark win against the Titans. Four consecutive weeks of pitiful, eerily similar football.

And all the while, Eric Mangini has taken exquisite pains to betray no sense of alarm or urgency. As has been his wont since day one, he has remained the very picture of outward calm, tirelessly repeating his ever-familiar mantra about avoiding mistakes and moving forward. To witness his manicured media persona is to think him as always in control, never given to the whims and folly that mark the behavior of many other coaches around the league. But the bottom line belies the façade. He has fiddled while the Jets have burned.

Mangini had a chance to fix the problem weeks ago, when it first appeared that the Jets were headed downhill and when it became obvious that neither Schottenheimer nor Sutton was capable of righting this ship. The Jets' loss to the Broncos following their win in Tennessee was excusable as losses go. It was a poorly played game to be certain, both familiar for the Jets mind-numbing inability to defend against the pass and novel for their sudden inability to rush the passer or stop the run. But above all, it was a classic letdown: something familiar if not altogether acceptable. But their follow-up loss to a terrible 49ers team in San Francisco ought to have sounded an alarm. And if the Jets are left with their hands pressed up against the playoff glass a week from now, it will be that game and the week that followed that sealed their fate.

The ugly loss in San Francisco bespoke a foundering team in desperate need of a second wind. It was not only high time for a change; it was Eric Mangini's golden opportunity to place his unique stamp on this team and thereby escape, once and for all, the titanic shadow of Bill Belichick and the several scandals that had linked the two men since Mangini moved south. Certainly, after two horrendous performances against the Broncos and 49ers, at least one of the coordinators ought to have been fired.

In fairness, replacing Schottenheimer, although necessary, would have been difficult because the Jets appeared to lack any obvious alternative. But what excuse for failing to act on defense, where Bob Sutton had shown himself to be far out of his depth? After all, Eric Mangini came here with a nearly unmatched defensive pedigree. For ten years, he was groomed by perhaps the foremost defensive thinker in pro- football history. He brought the 3-4 defense to the Jets. He knew it better than anyone this side of Foxborough. He could have stepped in to coach the defense at any time. And yet he was content to stand by and allow Sutton to run the ship aground.

Although there's no guarantee that firing Sutton or Schottenheimer would have proved a sudden cure for the Jets' ills, it would have been superior to the alternative, as subsequent weeks have borne out. Doing nothing was not merely a mistake; it was an egregious error owing more to stubbornness and ego than to strategic calculation. Even if Mangini were truly dumbfounded by the Jets' downward turn, he had to know that Sutton was not getting through to the defense. That alone warranted his ouster. Now, of course, it's too late. The Jets have spun wildly out of control, and there are no firings or hirings that will save this season. The time for that is past.

For some reason, perhaps unknowable, Eric Mangini could not depart from his own orthodoxy. He became too rigid, too married to his system, too doctrinaire to make the pragmatic changes necessary to save the Jets. And if the Jets find themselves at home after next week's game against the Dolphins, owner Woody Johnson will hard-pressed for reasons to bring Mangini back. To date, the Mangini regime has been less modeled on Bill Belichick's reign in New England than on Belichick's much-maligned tenure in Cleveland, where his gruff manner and staunch unwillingness to acknowledge errors soon left him on the NFL scrap heap. If only in this respect, Mangini appears a good bet to follow in the footsteps of his celebrated boss.   

Now Eric Mangini may very well have just one more week to get this right. And sadly, even a virtuoso performance against the Dolphins may not be enough to save either his team or his job.

Yesterday afternoon, and with time running out in yet another near-certain fiasco, Abram Elam and Shaun Ellis secured a bailout: a shocking 31-27 win over the Buffalo Bills at the Meadowlands.

With just minutes left, yesterday’s game appeared a lost cause for the Jets. For the third straight game, the Jets’ glaring inability to slow opposing offenses had pushed them to the precipice of disaster. They had allowed 27 points to a Bills team that had managed a grand total of two field goals in its previous two games. They had allowed Bills running back Marshawn Lynch to embarrass them by bursting through half-hearted arm tackles and carrying Jets defenders for yards at a time. They had allowed backup quarterback J.P. Losman to net two touchdowns, one on a 9-yard scramble up the middle in the first quarter, the other on a well-thrown pass to receiver Steve Johnson late in the second. They had allowed rookie cornerback Leodis McKelvin to run untouched for a 100-yard kickoff return touchdown that was nullified only by a suspicious holding call on Bills reserve linebacker Jon Corto.

With 5:39 remaining in the fourth quarter, and the Jets clinging to a 24-21 lead, Bills running back Fred Jackson carried a horde of Jets defenders over the goal line for an 11-yard touchdown run and an eventual 27-24 lead. Leon Washington would return the ensuing kickoff 43 yards, placing the Jets in prime field position at the 50-yard line with 5:22 remaining. But the offense failed to gain a first down for the third consecutive drive, and the Jets were forced to punt with just 4:29 left.

After a holding penalty backed Buffalo up to its own 10 yard line, the Bills used consecutive runs by Marshawn Lynch to set up a critical 3rd and 1 at their own 19-yard line with just 2:53 left. And as has so often been the case over the past three weeks, the Jets’ run defense proved unequal to the task, allowing Lynch to knife through the left side for three yards and a first down. The clock ticked down to 2:11 before the Bills ran their next play: another five-yard gain for Lynch on first down. Timeout, Jets. With 2:06 left in regulation, it was 2nd and 5 for the Bills at their own 27. Another Bills first down would decide the game and, perhaps, the Jets’ season.

Enter Bills coach Dick Jauron. After a game in which the Jets had allowed a season high 187 rushing yards to Buffalo running backs, the Bills would run a pass play on second down. Rolling to his right after the snap, Losman never saw a streaking Abram Elam, who came off the left side on a safety blitz. Elam’s right arm wrapped around Losman’s outside shoulder, twisting him around and jarring the ball lose before Losman hit the ground. Linebacker Bryan Thomas dove for the ball but was unable to corral it, as defensive end Shaun Ellis also reached down, attempting to scoop it up. Ellis’s first attempt pitched the ball upward and back to the Bills’ 11-yard line, where it would take yet another bounce, two feet off the ground and softly into the hands of a speeding Ellis, who would rumble 10 yards along the sideline for the unlikeliest of touchdowns and a 34-27 lead with 1:54 left. The Jets would go on to intercept Losman on each of the Bills remaining drives and emerge with a critical win to advance to 9-5 and keep pace with Dolphins and Patriots, both of whom secured wins of their own en route to maintaining the three-way tie atop the AFC East.

But even now, questions linger. This bailout washed away a multitude of sins. We will forget that the Jets’ run defense appears broken, that the pass rush was virtually nonexistent, that they allowed 27 points to a team that had managed six points in its last two games combined, that they couldn’t tackle, and that the offensive play-calling was once again bad.

And if there is a downside to such a seemingly uplifting victory, this is it. Had the Jets lost this game, as they certainly would have had it not been for an almost inconceivable Bills meltdown, the team would have been rocked to its core, and there would likely have been significant changes made.

But notwithstanding the narrow win, those changes still need to be made. Not three weeks ago, the Jets were the talk of the league. But in three consecutive weeks, the run defense has been shoddy, the pass rush has taken a vacation and the pass defense has been abominable. Even the special teams, once a clear-cut strength, have failed them.

This game should produce less celebration of the near-miss and more contemplation of why the fluke finish was necessary in the first place. The Jets are still very much a team in disarray, and they have just two weeks—perhaps less--in which to solve the problem.

They can do it, of course. That’s the way this league works in 2008. Now more than ever, it’s not over until it’s over. Just as they improved from 3-3 also-rans to the toast of the league at 8-3, so can they put these past three weeks safely in the rear-view mirror with quality efforts against the Seahawks and Dolphins.

If the Jets show up in Florham Park this week determined to make whatever changes are necessary after their mostly disastrous performance before a home crowd yesterday afternoon, they will stand a credible chance of recapturing the form that saw them demolish the undefeated Titans in Tennessee. But they shouldn’t believe for a moment that they can continue to do what they’re doing. Next time, there will be no bailout.

But not here. And not for the Jets, whose agonizing 24-14 loss to a 4-8 49er team yesterday in San Francisco leaves many questions but yields one conclusion: They’re one of the worst-coached teams in the league. Of course, neither that nor the full extent of their other problems figures to see the light of day during any of the Pravda-style press conferences sure to follow this week in Florham Park, but it’s true just the same. And it needs to change.

Football, difficult though it may be, is not rocket science, and the game has been around long enough that true innovation is almost nonexistent. What happens on Sunday around the league has been done before, seen before, and stopped before.

And yet, because every team is outcoached on occasion, the temptation will be to overlook yesterday’s manifest coaching failure in San Francisco, to dismiss it as an aberration. Problem is, it’s becoming more than an anomaly. It’s now obvious even to less astute observers, and it has to be particularly galling for a Jets franchise that went to New England three years ago to recruit Eric Mangini, the football equivalent of the son of Solomon. He was the boy-faced man who had served as prized protégé to the greatest football coach in the world, Bill Belichick. For 10 years, Mangini had watched him; venerated him; emulated him--all in the hope of becoming the next Bill Belichick. The Jets had taken notice, too, and when they tapped him as the 14th head coach in franchise history, it was in the hope and belief that he stood the greatest chance of any candidate to become the next Belichick or at least something close. To date, it hasn’t quite worked out that way.

And if that wasn’t clear previously, it was rammed home yesterday afternoon in San Francisco, where the Jets were thoroughly outclassed not by the genius of Bill Belichick or even the offensive mastery of Mike Shanahan but by interim head coach Mike Singletary, whose brief coaching tenure in San Francisco has been marked chiefly by a his attempt to seize the attention of his players by spontaneously pulling his pants down during a team meeting. These are the depths to which the team has fallen not two weeks after beating the Tennessee Titans in arguably the best regular-season win in franchise history.

The fault is not all Mangini’s. The two main culprits are familiar faces in their own right: coordinators Brian Schottenheimer and Bob Sutton. More than any other mistake, it’s been Mangini’s reliance on the league’s good old boy network that has been his undoing.

In truth, neither Schottenheimer nor Sutton has any business being an NFL coordinator. Schottenheimer is here because he has the right last name; Sutton, because he bears the imprimatur of Bill Parcells--the equivalent of three Michelin stars in the close-knit coaching ranks of the NFL. But with each passing game, it becomes clearer that both are better suited to being position coaches under a qualified coordinator and neither is up to the task of matching up with the better offensive and defensive minds around the league.

Schottenheimer has somehow managed to pair Brett Favre with two highly talented receivers and still come away with one of the more anemic passing attacks in the league. Add his often bizarre, self-defeating play-calling, typified by a plethora of third-and-short passing plays, wide-receiver screens designed to get three yards, and an assortment of high-risk, low-reward trickery, and you have yourself a competitive disadvantage of increasing significance.

In fairness, the Jets have scored plenty of points on the whole, but looking at both the players and the play-calling, it seems plain that this has more to do with personnel than with Schottenheimer. After sitting through yet another mess yesterday afternoon, one can’t help but wonder how many more points they would have scored with a top-shelf coordinator.

Bob Sutton presents an even clear case than Schottenheimer, who, as noted above, at least has the saving grace of heading a team ranked near the top in points scored. In a town infamous for its result-oriented approach to all things, Bob Sutton seems an unlikely candidate to continue much longer as defensive coordinator. After 14 weeks and 13 games, Sutton’s defense remains palpably clueless in pass coverage, repeating familiar mistakes and showing no apparent signs of progress.

Yesterday afternoon proved merely an extension of the misadventure, as the Jets were shredded through the air by a 49ers offense composed largely of castoffs, retreads, has-beens, and draft busts. Their lone star, running back Frank Gore, left the game for good early in the second half with a sprained ankle, but it wouldn’t matter. The Jets allowed 49er quarterback Shaun Hill, who had managed to appear in all of four games over the past six seasons, to complete 72 percent of his passes for 285 yards and two touchdowns.

Time and again, the Jets were duped by the same shifts and close formations that Brian Schottenheimer had used to marginal success over the past two seasons. Doubtless, Sutton had seen similar formations in practice in 2006 and 2007, yet neither he nor his players appeared even remotely able to diagnose the problem, let alone solve it. They were as clueless in the fourth quarter as they were in the first. In fact, it soon became so glaring that even CBS commentator Phil Simms, never one to heap undue embarrassment on players or coaches, was forced to acknowledge the disarray, noting that the Jets were so confused as to their coverage assignments that two players often wound up inadvertently covering the same receiver, thereby leaving another player wide open.

This kind of nonsense would be intolerable under any circumstance, but the considerable talent in evidence on this defense makes it a travesty. The Jets have a formidable front seven, and even their comparatively weak secondary is home to cornerback Darrelle Revis and safety Kerry Rhodes, both of whom are likely among the league’s top 10 players at their respective positions. The presence of Revis alone ought to be sufficient to shut down one half of the field. Add the fact that the Jets’ stout run defense enables them to consistently force third and long, and it seems even more likely that they should excel in pass defense. There is simply no excuse for their continuing inability to stop even the most mediocre passing offenses.

The time has come to make a change. Not next week. Not next season. Not after it’s too late. The time to make the change is now. It’s high time that Eric Mangini dispense with his Potemkin Village and admit what is already plain to all: This defense stinks, and it won’t leave the Jets with so much as a snowball’s chance in hell come playoff time unless affirmative action is taken now.

Sutton needs to go. He was hired in the first place largely because of his ties to Bill Parcells, and he has failed to distinguish himself during his tenure. It’s time for Eric Mangini to stop hoping that his affected air of calm will continue to be mistaken for competence. It’s time for Eric Mangini to put his stamp on this football team.

Certainly, no one knows this defense any better than Mangini, who served not only as coordinator but also defensive backs coach in New England. He can fix this. He must fix this. The season depends on it.

That team was the Jets. And after their celebrated destruction of Tennessee, it was said of the Titans that they had become too fat and too satisfied with their own success to appreciate the threat that a rising Jets team presented.

This week, in a rich irony, another upstart team packed its bags and traveled to play the newly anointed class of the AFC. And once again, the upstarts prevailed, this time demolishing the Jets before a cold, rain-soaked crowd by a nearly identical score of 34-17.

This was a stinging failure. And as is so often the case both in New York sports and in New York generally, it’s not long before post-failure analysis gives way to blame allocation. In this case, there was plenty to go around, starting with offensive coordinator Brian Schotteheimer, whose curious playcalling cost the Jets at least a touchdown as well as the early-game momentum.

Facing a driving rain storm and the league’s 26th-ranked rush defense on the opening drive of the game, Schottenheimer called a hybrid reverse to Jerricho Cotchery, whose sure hands proved no match for a slick ball that quickly hit the ground, bouncing backward and away from him. Cotchery appeared to cover the ball at the Jets’s 25-yard line, but as Broncos defenders pounced on him, the ball was jarred loose and scooped up by the Broncos’ Vernon Fox, who returned it for a 23-yard touchdown. The Jets attempted to challenge the play, but because the officials never ruled that Cotchery had possession of the ball during the apparent recovery, the play was declared unreviewable. 7-0, Broncos.

Of course, the box score will fault Cotchery both for botching the initial pitch and for failing to secure the ball after the fumble. But the real fault lay squarely at the feet of Schottenheimer, who called for ball-handling trickery, in horrible weather conditions, despite the fact that he had the AFC’s leading rusher matched up against one of the worst run defenses in the league.

The Jets would tie the game at 7-7 on the next drive, when Thomas Jones took the opening handoff from the Jets’ 41, burst through the right side and ran untouched along the sideline for a 59-yard touchdown, his longest run from scrimmage in over 900 carries. But the Broncos would quickly answer on the ensuing drive, when, on 2nd and 10 from their own 41, quarterback Jay Cutler fired a deep out along the right sideline for wide receiver Eddie Royal, who made the catch at the Jets’ 40 and over the outstretched arms of Ty Law.

The play ought to have been stopped then and there for a modest 20-yard gain, but safety Abram Elam played the pass too aggressively, trying to make a play on the ball rather than wrapping Royal up. As a result, Elam missed the tackle, and Royal ran down the sideline for a touchdown. The Jets challenged the touchdown after a replay appeared to show that Royal had stepped out of bounds while running down the sideline, but the call was upheld. 14-7, Broncos. The play would prove a portent of things to come for a beleaguered Jets secondary that had had no answer for Cutler or the talented receiving triumvirate of Brandon Marshall, Eddie Royal, and tight end Tony Scheffler.

The Jets went three and out on the next series, and the Broncos took over once again at their own 41, where, on the first play from scrimmage, rookie running back Peyton Hillis gashed the Jets for a 19-yard burst up the middle and to the Jets’ 40. Hillis would gain another 10 yards on the drive before the Broncos settled for a 25-yard field goal from kicker Matt Prater to take a 17-7 lead with 1:48 remaining in the first quarter. The Jets answered on their next drive, opening play at their own 39 and mixing short runs and passes to advance to the Denver 29. On the next play, Thomas Jones knifed through the middle for what appeared to be a 5-yard gain before he was upended. But because Jones wound up on top of the would-be tackler and never touched the ground, he quickly bounced up and ran past a Broncos secondary for a 29-yard touchdown. The play was challenged but upheld. 17-14, Broncos.

The tide now appeared to be turning. And after the Jets forced a Broncos punt on the following drive, it seemed as if they were prepared to seize control of the game. They opened play at their own 19 and quickly picked up a first down on an 11-yard strike from Brett Favre to Cotchery. But on first down from his own 31, Favre lobbed a ball deep down the left side, overthrowing Laveranues Coles but finding Broncos cornerback Dre’ Bly for what appeared to be a relatively innocuous interception not appreciably distinct from a punt. It would soon prove otherwise.

The Broncos quickly marched down the field, mixing passes to Brandon Marshall and Tony Scheffler before capping the drive with a 1-yard touchdown run from Peyton Hillis, who carried three times for 26 yards on the drive. 24-14, Broncos.

Perhaps more than any of their other faults yesterday, the Jets’ shocking inability to stop Hillis, the converted fullback and seventh-round draft pick, proved their undoing. Hillis would go on to collect 129 yards on 22 carries against the Jets’ vaunted run defense.

Following a Jets three-and out on the next possession, the Broncos extended the lead further on a 35-yard field goal from Prater with just eight seconds remaining in the half. 27-14, Broncos. The game was over for the Jets, who would manage just three points in the second half.

What’s needed most after any loss—especially a New York loss--is proper perspective. Here, logic counsels that yesterday’s performance was not a disaster.

It was not the end of this team’s Super Bowl hopes, and it certainly wasn’t the “same old Jets.” It was a loss—-a disappointing loss to be certain, but a loss to a formidable, first-place team that had underperformed largely because of injury. The notion that the Jets, having beaten the Patriots and Titans in consecutive weeks, were going to sail through the remainder of their schedule unchallenged and unscathed was plainly unrealistic.

The Jets are not a great team. They’re a good team with adequate personnel. Their margin for error is not so wide as to leave them thinking that they can beat any team, whether it be the Broncos or the lowly Raiders, when they don’t play well.

This is not merely the truth about the Jets; it’s the truth about today’s NFL. Only last week, the Broncos team that blitzed the Jets was thrashed on its homefield by a horrid Raiders team. The modern NFL is not simply a year-to-year league; it’s a week-to-week league.

Thus far, the Jets have shown the ability both to beat the best and lose to the worst, but they need to understand that a dazzling victory or a deflating loss in the previous week will have nothing to say about the following week’s game. It’s this lesson, more than any other, that the Jets must learn if they are to advance far in the playoffs. And if this loss serves to further that understanding, it may well prove providential.

Not in the last twenty-five years have the Jets performed so remarkably in a game of such monumental proportions and when so few afforded them any realistic chance to win.

With just a slim one-game advantage over two divisional rivals, the Jets traveled to Nashville to face a 10-0 Tennessee Titans team featuring the league’s top-ranked defense and a raucous home crowd clearly energized at the prospect of an undefeated season. In such a dire circumstance, even a close loss would have gained the Jets a fair measure of respect in some circles, and a victory of any kind, even by the slightest of margins, would have been sufficient to reform the AFC playoff picture to an appreciable extent. But the significance of their startling 34-13 demolition of the Titans is nearly unquantifiable for a team that has too often saved its smallest efforts for the biggest stages. In this respect, yesterday’s walkover victory extends far beyond the realm of mere surprise and now stands as the preeminent black-swan event of this NFL season.

Yesterday’s victory is significant not merely for its palpable impact on the Jets’ divisional standing and playoff seeding but also as further evidence of both the team’s rapidly changing mindset and its ever-evolving utilization of personnel. With each passing game, these Jets bear less resemblance to the timid bunch previously known best for playing just well enough to lose. The team is shedding its former identity as a victim franchise, filling the psychological void created by 40 years of incompetence with the unbowed enthusiasm of Brett Favre, the Pro Bowl resume of Alan Faneca, the unyielding presence of Kris Jenkins, the electricity of Leon Washington and a growing belief in its own ability to prevail despite the name on its helmet.

In this NFL climate, confidence is key. This, after all, is 2008, not 1988 or even 1998. The talent disparities that separate the 32 NFL teams are no longer the chasms that divided winners and losers in years past. The talent margins of today’s leading teams are thinner than at any other point in league history. Expansion, the salary cap, and the free flow of information have revolutionized the NFL, transforming it from a highly polarized league dominated by a handful of elite teams to a more egalitarian environment wherein the fact of success or failure is more often traceable to cohesion, coaching, and execution than to any broad inequities in the quantum of talent possessed by the best and worst teams. Even now, it’s difficult to look at this Jets team and believe that its personnel is clearly or significantly superior either to that of the Patriot team it defeated last week or the Titans team that it destroyed yesterday afternoon.

Yesterday’s Jets were the same Jets who were embarrassed on Sunday night in San Diego, who lost so miserably to a horrid Raider team in Oakland, and who struggled so mightily to dispatch bottom-dwellers like the Bengals and Chiefs.

Their continuing on-field evolution shows that the Jets are fast becoming beneficiaries of the offseason moves that appeared to cause so much chaos and confusion in the season’s opening weeks. And it makes them virtually unique among the NFL’s elite in their capacity for further improvement even at this late stage. Nearly all the their rivals field more mature teams whose core players have played together longer and have thus come closer to realizing the full extent of their combined potential. The Jets, in contrast, may as yet be in the ascent. Each week, they seem to unfurl a new and previously unknown or underappreciated aspect of their team.

For instance, beyond what has already been said of yesterday’s resounding win, it should be noted that the game may very well have marked the birth of a bona fide New York star. Although he totaled just 43 yards on six catches, the rookie tight end Dustin Keller was as responsible for the Jets’ thunderous triumph as any player on their sideline. For the third straight week, Keller proved nearly indefensible, embarrassing the Titans’ defense not only by virtue of several key catches that helped the Jets turn the tide on a hostile crowd in the games opening minutes but also by drawing three critical interference penalties after he repeatedly torched the Titans’ clueless linebacking corps. The rookie’s sudden emergence after half a season of virtual irrelevance has had the practical effect of gift-wrapping a Pro Bowl tight end for an offense that was already beginning to rank among the NFL’s elite.

Critically, it is precisely this kind of late-season improvement that has marked the trajectory of so many Super Bowl teams over the last 10 years. Certainly, not all the teams that went on to win the Super Bowl were clear favorites in the season’s opening weeks. Many of them spent the first portion of the season negotiating their own trials and tribulations before peaking late in the year and when it counted most.

Whether the Jets will ultimately become one of those teams is far from decided. It’s only November. But there is no avoiding the reality that their rapid rise in recent weeks has stoked enthusiasms not seen here since 1998 and, before that, the Nixon administration. That alone is worth savoring as the Jets contemplate their renaissance win in Nashville and begin to set their eyes upon still greater prizes.

That speculation was wrong.

And if that much were not apparent before last night’s stunning, season-altering 34-31 overtime win against the New England Patriots in Foxborough, then it ought to have been apparent afterward. Favre played his best, most complete game of the season, helping stake the Jets to a 24-6 lead in the first half and then rallying the team twice thereafter, once late in the fourth quarter to cap a seven-minute drive with a go-ahead touchdown and a 31-24 lead and then, most spectacularly, in overtime to win the game on the strength of Jay Feely’s 32-yard field goal.

And that’s why you get Brett Favre. You get Brett Favre because he never gives up on a game, because he never gives up on his teammates, and most importantly, because he never lets his teammates give up on themselves. He simply will not allow it. He is, above all else, a winner: a rare and worthy distinction in itself but absolutely imperative for a team whose history, fraught with bizarre, increasingly inventive failure, presides like a green-speckled albatross atop every stadium in which the Jets play.

By all appearances, Favre is not troubled in the least by what’s happened here and has little interest in having it recounted to him. So far as he’s concerned, the Bates Motel is actually a charming fixer-upper with untapped potential for expansion, brand enhancement, and future revenue growth. Favre is not scared of the Jets, and it shows. Indeed, if New York fans and national media outlets have seemed more troubled by Favre’s interceptions than Favre, himself, it’s because they are: Favre is not now--and never has been--particularly concerned with interceptions. They roll off his conscience like water off a duck’s back. He is unfazed by mistakes because he regards himself as an aggressor, as the one to be feared, not as a victim waiting to be devoured. Whereas the Jets have spent the better part of the last 40 years trying not to lose, Favre has spent his career trying to win. And their divergent results tell the tale.

Favre rescued the Jets from the Patriots, from themselves, and even from head coach Eric Mangini. But as is so often the case in sports, it is the destination, not the journey, that wins the greatest notice. And so the many trials and tribulations, some of which very nearly cost the Jets this landmark win, shall soon be forgotten, cast aside and forever obscured by the fact of victory. It is, after all, the prevailing tendency among players and fans alike to regard both wins and losses as absolute and unqualified, to find neither mitigation in defeat nor caveat in victory.

But this rule is more rightly honored in the breach. The unvarnished truth, swept away by Brett Favre and the right leg of Jay Feely, is that the Jets nearly lost this game through a series of glaring tactical errors, almost all of which were the product of the same fear-based conservatism that has marked this franchise for decades.

It began late in the first half. After Brett Favre hooked up with wide receiver Jerricho Cotchery on a 15-yard touchdown strike to push the Jets out to a 24-6 with 5:06 remaining in the second quarter, the defense quickly stopped the Patriots at their own 23 and forced a punt. The Jets took over on their own 30 with 2:33 remaining and two timeouts left. In front of them was a visibly tired, emotionally reeling Patriots defense. Rather than continue along the same course that saw his team amass an almost-surreal lead, Eric Mangini elected to sit on the football, allowing the clock to run down to the two-minute warning after Thomas Jones carried for one yard on first down. And after Favre missed Jerricho Cotchery on the next play, the Jets were flagged for a delay-of-game penalty, whose effect was to convert a makeable third and nine opportunity to a nearly impossible third and 14.

Predictably, the Jets ran the ball on third and long, failing to pick up the first down. Even more predictably, the Patriots took the ensuing possession and scored a touchdown to cut the lead to 26-13 with 20 seconds remaining in the half. The Jets had lost both their momentum and their mental edge, neither of which they would recapture until the very second that Feely’s kick sailed through the uprights in overtime.

Following a halftime that once again saw Mangini outcoached by the Machiavellian schemes of Bill Belichick, the Jets were on their heels. And after the Patriots scored a touchdown and two-point conversion in the waning seconds of the third quarter to cut the lead to 24-21, things seemed to be devolving into the same kind of debacle on which the Jets have been the league’s leading authority. But when Stephen Gostkowski connected on a 48-yard field goal with 10:22 left in the fourth quarter, things began to look especially dire.

To his everlasting credit, Favre would answer Gostkowski by leading the Jets on a methodical 14-play. 67-yard drive that would be capped by a one-yard Thomas Jones touchdown run and a 31-24 lead with 3:14 remaining in the game. The defense then forced three and out, and the Jets took over once again with just 2:33 remaining and victory near at hand. After Thomas Jones collected eight yards on two carries, the Jets faced a third down and two as the two-minute warning struck. The Patriots were out of timeouts. If the Jets were to secure a first down, the game would be over. But instead of entrusting the matter to Favre on a night when no Patriot defender had gotten even close to any of his passes, the Jets ran the ball, the apparent logic being that an incomplete pass would stop the clock, whereas even a failed run would cost the Patriots an additional 45 seconds.

Thomas Jones was stopped cold on third and two, and the Jets punted to the Patriots, who took over on their own 38 with 1:04 remaining and no timeouts left. It was then and there that Mangini nearly drove a stake through the Jets. Instead, of forcing Cassel to make difficult throws in a pressure situation, Mangini fell back into a prevent defense that could have been just as easily accomplished had the team remained in the sidelines. They allowed Cassel to go 5-5 for 67 yards, the last 14 of which were picked up on a touchdown pass to Randy Moss, who beat newly reacquired cornerback Ty Law along the sideline and sent the game to overtime.

Luckily, the Jets won the midfield toss. And luckily, they had Brett Favre, who, after being sacked on the first play of overtime and missing a pass to running back Leon Washington on second down, stepped up to deliver the ball that may very well have saved the Jets’ season. On third and 15 from his own 20, Favre dropped back and fired a bullet along the right sideline for tight end Dustin Keller, who made the catch and then dived across the first-down marker. A series of short runs and passes followed, and ten plays later, Feely stroked a 32-yard field goal that sneaked through the left upright and left the Jets winners.

Now at 7-3, the Jets are in prime position to win the AFC East and secure the second seed in the conference playoff alignment. In fact, they still have an outside chance to capture the No. 1 seed and, by extension, homefield advantage throughout the duration of the playoffs. In this respect, their win at Foxborough will begin to pay dividends almost immediately, as the Jets prepare to take on the conference-leading Tennessee Titans next week in Nashville. With their week 11 game already in the books, the Jets will now likely enjoy several days off in what will amount to a sort of mini-bye.

Meanwhile, the coaching staff will now have three extra days in which to study, scrutinize, and otherwise assess the Titans’ tendencies over their impressive, league-leading 9-0 start. The truth is that the Jets would have been an ideal candidate to hand the Titans their first loss anyway. In the age of parity, wherein individual matchups and smart gameplans often exert more influence over a particular outcome than broad talent disparities, the Jets appear to have an enviable angle on the Titans, who run the ball exceedingly well but have struggled to develop anything even remotely approximating a consistent passing attack with quarterback Kerry Collins.

The Jets, of course, have assembled a stalwart run defense but continue to struggle mightily to defend against the pass, as demonstrated conclusively and embarrassingly by last night’s 400-yard performance from Patriots starter, Matt Cassel. If the Jets can slow the Titans’ running game and force Collins into third-down passing situations, they would stand a very good chance to win the game and thereby shrink the Titans’ conference lead to two games or, should the Titans precede their meeting with the Jets losing this week to division rival Jacksonville, a single game with five left to play.

But that’s not how it turned out.

Instead, the Jets turned in a methodical, reassuringly businesslike 47-3 annihilation of a seemingly disinterested Rams team and, in the process, improved to an unlikely 6-3. Now, with seven games remaining, these Jets, already dead and buried by this time last season, are not simply contenders for a playoff spot or even their first division title since 2002. They are, by any fair measure, Super Bowl contenders.

Although this notion may invite some skepticism, either because the Jets were so pitiful only a year ago or even because they have played so unevenly through the first half of the season, you need only take stock of one increasingly apparent fact to know that it’s true: virtually none of the Jets’ conference rivals is any better than they are. Familiar AFC powers such as the Patriots, Steelers, Colts, and Chargers are but shells of their former selves, having been ravaged by age, injury, and managerial incompetence. What remains is a vast sea of mediocrity from which the Jets are as likely as any team to emerge. Only one team in the entire conference, the 9-0 Tennessee Titans, boasts a better record than do the Jets through week 10, and for all their dominance to date, the Titans are still quarterbacked by Kerry Collins. Yeah. Him.

Not in the last decade has this franchise had so few obstacles in its path or appeared more likely to overcome them. Through just nine games, they have already weathered several storms, including a demoralizing loss to a Bradyless Patriots team in week two’s home opener, the disastrous and utterly inexcusable loss to the Raiders, and a string of unnecessarily narrow victories against a spate of bottom-dwellers. They have been resilient and, in gross contrast to historical precedent, lucky.

Consider this about the Jets’ recent string of games. Just days before the Jets were set to square of with the then-winless Cincinnati Bengals, it was announced that the Bengals’ best player, quarterback Carson Palmer, would miss the game with a sore elbow. Backup Ryan Fitzpatrick played poorly in Palmer’s stead, and the Jets escaped with an uncomfortably close 26-14 win. The next week, as they prepared to play a seemingly improved Raider team, Oakland abruptly fired their head coach, replacing him with a man whom owner Al Davis claimed not to know. The next week, as the Jets began preparation for the Kansas City Chiefs, it was announced that the Chiefs’ star running back, Larry Johnson, would be suspended for a violation of team rules. In his place, the Chiefs started Kolby Smith, whom the Jets limited to 16 yards on 11 carries in what proved a death-defying 28-24 escape. Last week, the Jets traveled to Buffalo to face a Bills team without defensive end Aaron Schobel, who had previously manhandled the Jets, beating left tackle D’Brickashaw Ferguson for four sacks over their last four meetings. Schobel was replaced by Ryan Denney, and neither he nor the Bills as a whole managed a single sack as the Jets played what was their most complete football game to date, beating the division leaders at Orchard Park. And finally, as they got set for this week’s trap game against a Rams team that had won two of its last four contests, including convincing wins over the Redskins and Cowboys, the Jets received word that the Rams’ best player, pro bowler Stephen Jackson, would not dress for the game. His replacement, Antonio Pittman, rang up just 28 yards on 13 carries.

The point is that the Jets appear to have gotten the kind of breaks that almost every Super Bowl contender needs. And for a franchise that has spent the better part of the last 40 years as a monument to Murphy’s Law, this is a remarkable turn of events. And although they are yet a work in progress and just one of several teams in the running, they have already achieved the one thing for which every player and fan dreams: an opportunity to play critical football games in the second half of the season.

In three short days, the Jets will travel to Foxboro to play their most important regular-season game in 10 years. As it stands, although the Jets and Patriots are ostensibly tied atop the AFC East, the Patriots hold the all-important tiebreaker by virtue of their victory over the Jets in week two. A win would make the Jets the odds-on favorite to prevail in the division and, more importantly, a good bet to secure both the second seed in the conference standings and the critical first-round playoff bye that goes with it. A loss would not necessarily exclude the Jets from the playoff picture, but it would almost certainly foreclose the possibility of a division title, a first-round bye, and by implication, a deep playoff run. So make no mistake: the Jets must win this football game.

This is the watershed moment of the Mangini era. It’s put up or shut up. The Jets are a better team than the Patriots, and now is the time to prove it. By rights, the Jets shouldn’t be nearly as daunted by this game as they likely are. After all, the Patriots are a 6-3 team just like the Jets. But after going 1-11 against the Patriots over their last 12 meetings, the most relevant question, as it was in week two, is not whether the Jets are better than the Patriots they will face on the field but whether they are better than the Patriots they will face in the their heads.

We’ll know in three days.

After a spate of curiously underwhelming performances against an assemblage of league doormats including the Bengals, Raiders and Chiefs, the Jets turned in their best, most complete performance of this 2008 season, defeating the division-leading Bills 26-17 at Orchard Park and securing a three-way tie atop the division along with the Bills and Patriots, who fell to 5-3 by virtue of an Adam Vinitieri field goal that propelled the wounded Colts to an 18-15 victory last night in Indianapolis.

Combining solid but unspectacular efforts on offense, defense and special teams, the Jets manufactured a performance remarkable chiefly for being unremarkable. There was no aerial assault, no gashing running game, and no impenetrable defense. There were no heroes and no goats; no large leads from the outset and no steep deficits to overcome. Gone was their seemingly schizophrenic alternation between the pinnacle of brilliance and the lowest depths of ineptitude. Instead there was a measured and methodical performance more in keeping with the lofty expectations initially sparked by an off-season spending spree and further stoked by the acquisition of Favre this August.

Faced both with a talented, front-running opponent and a notoriously hostile crowd, the Jets played more like smug, self-assured favorites than the timid, half-hearted bunch we had seen too often over the course of the first seven games. And if there is such a thing as a blueprint for defeating a significant favorite in its own building, this was it.

On the opening play of the game and amid the strains of 70,000 bloodthirsty onlookers, the Jets capitalized on an overaggressive Bills defense by calling a screen pass to Leon Washington, who, in a manner becoming increasingly familiar, combined quick acceleration with an array of dazzling juke moves en route to a 40-yard gain. The crowd fell suddenly silent, and the Jets soon owned a 3-0 lead courtesy of a 37-yard Jay Feely field goal. After the very first drive of the game, the Jets had already accomplished a virtual prerequisite to this kind of victory; they had neutralized the crowd and thereby stripped the Bills of one of the primary factors in the home-field calculus.

Second, and perhaps for the first time under the Mangini-Tannenbaum regime, the Jets manhandled their opponents on both sides of the ball. The defensive line, led by de facto team MVP Kris Jenkins, was dominant in terms of both pass rush and run defense. Without injured inside linebacker David Harris for support, the defensive line turned in a virtuoso performance that often began and ended in the Bills’ backfield. They were able to apply consistent pressure to Bills quarterback and incipient Jet-killer Trent Edwards throughout the game, forcing key incompletions and limiting Edwards’s opportunities to hookup with star wide receiver Lee Evans. Meanwhile, second-year running back and former first-round draft-choice Marshawn Lynch, who had torched a porous Jets front seven only a year ago, was stopped cold, totaling just 16 yards on 9 carries.

For its part, the Jets’ offensive line, by turn ballyhooed for its collection of high draft choices and maligned for its uneven and underwhelming play throughout the first half of this season, showed the first glimpses of cohesion by putting on a balanced and consistent performance that saw Thomas Jones average better than five yards a carry and, more importantly, held an opponent sackless for the first time this season.

Third, the Jets secondary, beset for some time with a revolving door at strong safety and inexperience at one cornerback, played its best game thus far, repeatedly converting opportunities into points. Whereas past weeks saw a veritable season’s worth of would-be interceptions that slid off the fingertips and forced fumbles that somehow found their way back into their opponent’s grasp, yesterday saw a notably opportunistic team.

It began on the Bills’ second drive of the game and after they had responded to the Jets’ early surge by moving quickly down the field, scoring a touchdown, and capturing a 7-3 lead. On first and 10 from his own 15, Trent Edwards dropped back to pass but missed a streaking cornerback Darelle Revis, who, set free on a rare cornerback blitz, caught Edwards unawares, blasting him from behind, jarring the football loose, and thereafter recovering it at the Bills six-yard line. The Jets would manage another three points and narrow the lead to 7-6.

The Bills took the ensuing kickoff at their own 30 and once again moved steadily down the field. Soon, the Bills had first and goal at the Jets’ eight yard-line. But once again, the defense rose to the challenge. On third and goal from the eight, Edwards dropped back, evaded pressure and fired a ball across his body to the left flat for speedy receiver Roscoe Parrish. As soon as the ball was released, strong safety Abram Elam, substituting for the still-concussed Eric Smith, broke sharply on the fluttering ball, catching it in mid-stride and returning it 92 yards for a Jets touchdown.

They would never trail again. The Jets took a 13-7 lead into halftime, and after the two teams traded field goals in the opening stages of the third quarter, the Jets extended the lead once again. Following a 52-yard field goal from Bills kicker Ryan Lindell, Leon Washington stood back near his own goal line awaiting the kickoff, which was angled hard to Washington’s left and very near the sideline. An alert Washington allowed the ball to bounce in bounds, hoping that it would bounce to the sideline and thereby place the Jets in prime field position. But as footballs are wont to do, the ball came to rest a mere foot from the sideline. It was a live ball. In the Jets’ smartest play of the entire season, Johnson utilized a little-appreciated rule to set the Jets up in fine fettle. Washington intentionally stepped out of bounds with his right foot and then reached back into the field of play to touch the football with his left hand. Under NFL rules, when a player standing at least partly out of bounds makes contact with a ball still within the field of play, the ball is ruled out of bounds. Result: Leon Washington alchemized a near-disaster into a Bills penalty and a first down for the Jets at their own 40-yard line. Four plays later, Thomas Jones would score on a six-yard jaunt through the middle and stake the Jets to a 23-10 lead that they would never surrender.

It is perhaps unwise to draw too much from yesterday’s win. Just as it was premature to declare the Jets dead after they lost to the dreadful Raiders in Oakland, so may it be premature to anoint them contenders solely on the basis of yesterday’s win. After all, the Jets’ documented tendency to play up or down to the level of opponents is more characteristic of an average team than of the playoff-level squad for which Jets fans have steadfastly hoped.

And yet something appears to be happening. These Jets, for all their acknowledged shortcomings, have not quit. They had ample opportunity to pack their bags after Oakland and yet another after the immortal Tyler Thigpen tore them asunder last week before their home crowd. But here they sit at 5-3 with more divisional wins than either the Bills or Patriots. And with traditional powers like the Colts, Chargers, and Patriots trudging through pedestrian seasons, the stars, somehow, are aligning for this historically star-crossed franchise.

But it would have been a close thing.

For the third time in as many weeks, the Jets were faced with a serendipitous opportunity to right their tattered ship against a listless bottom-dweller, and for the third straight game, they parlayed their good fortune into a bizarre misadventure fraught with curious play-calling, poor execution, and maddening self-sabotage. This time, it was against an abysmal Chiefs team so decimated by injuries and inner turmoil that it was forced to start Tyler Thigpen at quarterback.

It is incorrect to call Thigpen merely bad. By every conventional measure, he entered the game as the worst starting quarterback in the NFL and perhaps the worst quarterback the Jets had faced in a decade.

The numbers told the tale: in parts of eight games this season, Thigpen had managed to complete 42.2 percent of his passes for a staggeringly bad 4.36 yards per attempt and a cringe-worthy 44.3 passer rating. All three numbers qualified him for dead last among NFL quarterbacks. And yet, time and again yesterday afternoon, defensive coordinator Bob Sutton’s defense would make Thigpen look like a modern iteration of Len Dawson, as he completed 25 of 36 passes for 280 yards two touchdowns and no interceptions while compiling an obscene passer rating of 110.

With each passing game, Sutton’s glaring mismanagement of the defense comes more into focus. Here’s a snapshot: over the last three weeks against such quarterbacking luminaries as Ryan Fitzpatrick, JaMarcus Russell and Tyler Thigpen, the Jets have allowed opponents to complete 64 percent of their passes for 633 yards, three touchdowns, no interceptions, and an average passer rating of 90.1. Sheesh.

There is simply no excuse for allowing your defense, rife with high-priced veterans and budding young stars, to be shredded by a player who would never have seen the light of day in this league had it not been for a bizarre and highly unlikely series of injuries to his underwhelming superiors on the depth chart.

Inexplicably, the Jets’ defense ranks near the top of the league both in sacks and run defense yet seems unable to stop even the league’s worst offenses. If ever there were a time to consider relieving Sutton of his play-calling duties, this is it.

The Jets were fortunate to escape their own building with a win against a team that was essentially on the draft clock after six games, and one wonders exactly how many more meltdowns Sutton must orchestrate before he is held to account for what continues to be a decidedly mediocre tenure as defensive coordinator. This win aside, the Jets are in palpable need of a spark, and Eric Mangini’s defensive pedigree would seem to render him able to take over the defense with relatively little inconvenience. At 4-3, the Jets have little margin for error. There’s no sense in standing idle and waiting for the next disaster to strike before something is done. The time to make the change is now.

Unfortunately, most of the post-game talk ignored the defensive meltdown for yet more microanalysis of Brett Favre’s now-infamous penchant for throwing costly, ill-advised interceptions. But all media fanfare and bleacher grist aside, the fact remains that Favre has proved an enormous net gain for the Jets.

Surrounded by offensive personnel not appreciably different from the group that managed only 16.8 points a game in 2007, Favre has the team on pace to score an eye-popping 397 points: a number the Jets have eclipsed just once since the NFL implemented the 16-game schedule in 1978. And after all, it is points scored and no other measure that defines the performance of an offense and, by direct extension, its quarterback. The last thing Favre and the Jets need is interference from Eric Mangini and Brian Schottenheimer, neither of whom figures to join Favre in Canton. Besides, it should be borne in mind that, for all of Favre’s crushing interceptions yesterday afternoon, the Jets managed 28 points and would have scored 31 had Feeley not missed a makeable field goal. That kind of offensive output ought to be sufficient against any team, let alone one led by the likes of Tyler Thigpen.

For all their faults yesterday, the Jets won the game and now sit with as many victories as they mustered all last season. And as incredible as it may seem, just seven days after fans were left to winder whether this Jets season had effectively ended after an embarrassing loss to the Raiders in Oakland, the Jets will now begin preparing to play the Buffalo Bills next week for a share of the division lead. Imagine what they could do if the defense got some competent direction.