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The Jets are leading the league, in self confidence. I love players who believe in their ability, a team that believes in their coach and a team invested in the organizational philosophy, but there must be some serious cool-aid drinking going on at Cortland right now.
If you have Rex Ryan running your defense, there is a good chance it'll be in or around the top 10 in the league. However veteran linebacker Calvin Pace believes it is leading the pack
:"(Compared to) the rest of the defenses in the NFL? S---, man, we're the best."
"You ask anybody around the league, we're not the team you want to see coming in, even in a down year,"
There's a certain type of aggression when we come ... you know we're going to come with a lot of stuff and teams don't want to see that," the linebacker said. "They want to see a vanilla defense, that just lines up and you know where they're going to be."
We're the benchmark when we're doing well," Pace said. "I'll take these guys and Rex and this system any day."
Does anyone have a problem with this self-confidence? I don't really have a problem with it, but I do question whether we are over-compensating. We have always had a pretty good defense under Rex, but it has got progressively worse. Now we are coming into the season with a lot of question marks about our secondary. There is no question that we have one of the finest if not the finest defensive lines in football.
However we will be starting a rookie at safety (more than likely) with a veteran who has serious flaws (Landry) or a progressive safety still learning the ropes (Allen). We'll start a 2nd year corner who can't stay healthy and as mentioned, got benched three times for under-performance (Milliner) and an average corner who'is best suited to the nickel and was cut by the Dolphins (Patterson). We may start Walls, who was impressive in short stints, but may find it tougher in a full-time slot. In summary, there are far too many questions revolving around the secondary to anoint us the #1 defense, and I think the Jets know that, which is why we are reading so much bravado at the moment. They are trying to convince themselves as much as they are trying to convince us.