I would disagree with your assessment, and again, the numbers help out. The Jets weren’t an 8-3 juggernaut that lost heart after Mangini made some sort of decisions that bothered them; they were a mediocre team masquerading as a top team that finished up by playing at the level they started the year at, only the bounces didn’t go their way.

You can use DVOA to measure how teams played in a given game, both as a team and at the individual and unit levels. If you ended up with a positive DVOA for the game (and a better DVOA than your opponent), then you “deserved” to win the game. You played better. More often than not, that also means you won, but sometimes it means you played very well but had a bad break or two and lost. It helps separate out teams that won a lot of games but weren’t as good as their record (Miami) from teams that had bad luck but were really excellent (Philly). Anyway, the Jets season is basically a bell curve- they weren’t very good early on, then they got hot for about four weeks in the middle of the season, then they went back to being not very good at the end of the year. The Jets didn’t play much differently against San Francisco or Denver than they did against KC or Cincinnati; it’s just that they lost the later games, while they won the earlier ones. So while injuries (and perhaps coaching decisions) factored into the exact way the Jets lost later on, for the most part they just went back to playing the way they had for most of the year.

If you look at the DVOA on Week 12 when the Jets were at their absolute peak, it still wasn’t any better than 12th in the league, and the gap between how the Jets were playing and how a legitimate powerhouse team like the Giants were playing was bigger than the gap between the Jets and a team like the Oakland Raiders. People got excited, but the Jets really never belonged in the conversation about the true contending teams.

Feel free to defend the Jets all you like. Let’s hope soon they start winning so you don’t have to anymore.

I’m not suggesting that I’m the supreme arbiter of Jets fandom.

I here enough people ripping into the Jets in daily life -especially living Texas- that I sometimes wonder why the only people that really care have to bring each other down with the “same old Jets” mentality.

I don’t care how many charts and graphs and spiffy stats you have. Unless they can accurately predict the out come of games, then it’s a just technical way of saying “same old Jets.”

I like to peruse FO myself until the Jets lose to a someone with worse DVOAs.

Statistics are a tool for measuring, not predicting. The further out you extrapolate – say out to September – the less accurate the extrapolation becomes.

Hey maybe I shouldn’t read the comments, but that’s the best part about this site.

I apologize for getting a little personal, but I take personally when some has a beef with my team.

Keep doing what you’re doing.

Like I’ve said.. I respect all the research that goes into your numbers. The projections and the systems have worked for you, and that’s fine.

It’s the human element that interests me most. Rex is a rookie head coach, and I know there are going to be bumps along the way. But I have no doubt that this team will play harder for him than they did for Mangini.

In the Jets 2008 slide, the team lost faith when Mangini changed up the whole system after the Broncos loss. He lost confidence in what he was doing, and it reflected on the team.

The final numbers were a direct result of that lost confidence.

Your projections could turn out to be spot on. But Rex Ryan could turn them around completely. That’s what we have to have faith in as fans.

Maybe I’m too much of a Ryan guy at this point. But when he said he doesn’t care about what the other teams are doing, I believed him.

He’s just reporting some numbers he didn’t even run himself, but happens to put a lot of stock into. Don’t shoot the messenger.

Obviously the 2008 numbers were run prior to getting Favre, so we can’t make a fair comparison. I recall that they were fairly positive though, so with the Jets finishing 9-7, I guess that was pretty accurate.

I actually remember that year vividly, the first game against Denver. Elway tore us apart, and it only got worse from there.

Anyway, sinse you’ve admitted the error in your way, you can buy me a beer and we’ll call it even. So where will we meet? lol.