It's finally time to grow...

It's perhaps a paradox to say that a team needs to grow after it's reached 2 AFC championship games in a row.

But then, aside the 1969 triumph, the Jets playoff history is a paradox in itself. It almost inevitably ends in extremely bitter pain and last night's nightmare in Pittsburgh was no exception. With the Jets shockingly  absent from the field in the 1st half, the Steelers roamed and cruised to a 24-3 halftime lead and the only surprise was that the score didn't get worse.

In a perverted sense, as halftime arrived I wished the scorline had gotten farther out of hand. At least then it would be somewhat easier to deal with it all. I could've said "we didn't show up and we were rightfully destroyed" which is what I'd said when we were bombed by the Patriots 45-3 about a month ago. But no. It had to be painful: because the Jets showed up with a vengeance in the second half. And then I knew. I knew the script was going to be one that we've all seen before. It was going to go down to the wire and end in green tears.

There were at least 3 times in the second half where I was sure the Jets were done only to see them score and stay in it.  And they kept scoring. And scoring. Until they ran out of time to climb out of that hole they'd allowed themselves in. This is why, if we were destined to be eliminated I would have preferred a blow-out, I seriously would have.

The inexplicable no-show by the Jets in the 1st half has already been attributed by some sports journalists to fatigue. And sure enough after having beaten the Colts and the Patriots on the road only to have to go in Pittsburgh and beat a 3rd top NFL team in a row was definitely stretching the odds. But fatigue? I don't know. The Jets were not stomped over in the first 30 minutes because of some genius schemes the Pitt offense was running. It wasn't because of turnovers. It  was because they simply were not there.

If anything failed  (and it failed completely)  in the first half that had to be the tackling. The most fundamental of all football fundamentals. I lost count of how many runs the Steelers put together  that started out as busted and dead plays only to miraculously wind up as positive yardage 3 or 4 broken tackles later. Broken tackles was the good scenario actually. Because there were plenty of outright missed tackles as well. It was simply amazing (negatively speaking) to watch that. Anybody can miss or botch a tackle of course, it's not unheard of that a team can even have a short spell of bad tackling in a series that leads to a score. Hell, the Saints botched 9 tackles in a row in one play against the Seahawks!  But here we're talking about a team missing tackles for a an entire half.

To me that can not be explained away by fatigue. No, that can only be explained by inadequate mental readiness for the task at hand. The Jets came on the field without being psychologically ready for the game. The Steelers were simply running through ghost tacklers, probably being themselves surprised at how unlikely easy it was. It was similar to walking in a store and shoplifting right in front of the owner without yielding a response from him. And then doing it again after 5 minutes, and again, and again. The shoplifter himself would be perplexed. I don't think that this was what the Steelers envisioned coming into the game, that they'd be basically running through straw-men for 30 minutes. Yet that was the story and as the old and tested theory in sports  goes: you win and lose games in your head and then on the pitch.

The entire first half was a blank spot in the Jets' head as a whole. It was a non-event for the defense who couldn't tackle anything, for the offense who couldn't execute anything, for the coaches who were helplessly scratching their heads on the sidelines. For the Jets fans in the stands it was like watching the X-files live.

Now, I can't fathom how you can be at the AFC championship game and not be mentally ready for it. It's beyond me, but I need to attempt to explain it. One explanation might be that the psychological burden of all the critical playoff disasters of the past caught up with the Jets, again. A team's history is not some abstract thing, it's a very real thing and it can wreak havoc in the psychology of a team if they've been there before and found absurd ways to screw up. Theoretically, that should be exactly the reason to be especially prepared for a match like that. But if that was the reason the Jets disappeared in the first half it means that this psychological burden weighed down on them like a 100 ton stone.I don't know what speech Ryan delivered at halftime, it obviously worked for the most part, but it was also obviously too late.

Now, one can go and dissect everything that happened in the second half and theorize on how the Jets could still have won. It's true too. The Jets, incredibly, could still have won. Alone the inexplicable play decisions on that fateful goal line stand by the Steelers would be enough as an argument. But one has to remember that if you fall behind 24-3 to the Steelers of all teams at halftime, and in their home turf, then everything has to go your way to overturn that score in the second half: the breaks, the plays, the decisions you make or don't make, the other team failing with all of theirs, in short you gotta be perfect walking an extremely tight rope while the opponent fails to put the final nail on the coffin. It does happen, maybe once every 10-15 years. Didn't happen last night.

It's been a tremendous season for the Jets, we all agree on that I would think. But it ended in a very Jets-like fashion, with a bitter loss that we have been very conditioned to in the history of the team. In the end, the fact that we took out Manning and Brady, away, and as underdogs of course, will feel lost in a haze of bitterness. Understandably so, to a degree.

But it's been over 40 years now, and we need to somehow get that chronic monkey of our backs. That monkey is getting awfully old. The current Jets team is a great team but no-one knows how it will look come September time. I'm confident that Ryan will field yet another highly competitive team next year, but the point is that chances like this year's or the one before  do not come too often. When opportunities like that come you grab them with both hands and you don't let go. The Jets need to grow out of the pattern of getting to the pond only to find out it's just a mirage in the desert. They need to cross that desert and reach the sea. There's no excuses, not good ones anyway, for constantly failing dramatically at the most critical moment.

It won't be easy to get to a 3rd AFC championship in a row. But to me, the most difficult part seems to be getting past that. I remember when the Bills kept losing one Superbowl after the other until it really became a trademark pattern. This is what the Jets need to avoid even if in their case it means the AFC championship game. It's time the Jets grow out of their old self and into a new mentally robust one.