 |
| Mark Sanchez (Photo: Nick St. Denis) |
Still, the Jets lost in the AFC Championship game in consecutive years, playing away from home all six playoff games. New York will likely have to get even better at home, and maybe even in the AFC, to avoid yet another tough playoff road in 2011.
Monday night, the Jets got off to a 1-0 start at home with a dramatic 27-24 victory over the Dallas Cowboys. The team’s players and coaches have repeatedly been asked if they expect a letdown following such an emotional, built-up win in the Sept. 11 game. But coach Rex Ryan and his Jets say playing at home against an AFC opponent in the Jacksonville Jaguars is enough motivation in itself.
At least according to Ryan’s math, it is.
“When you really look at the reality of the situation, (Dallas is) an NFC team and so that counts as a game,” Ryan said Wednesday. “In my strange math, this one counts as a game and a quarter because it’s an AFC team. Your divisional games count as a game and a half. For whatever reason, it always seems like when the tiebreakers come out, that math usually works.”
With "a game and a quarter" at stake, the Jets are stressing how critical it is to take advantage of playing at home.
Wednesday, after calling the game a "must-win," quarterback Mark Sanchez emphasized just how important it is to have the home crowd doing their part while the opposing offense is on the field.
“The way our crowd rose up for that game last week, that’s huge, and we’re going to need them big time this week,” he said. “We need them screaming when the other team’s on offense, we need them to get penalties on offense."
Dallas quarterback Tony Romo made some critical mistakes late in Monday night’s game, likely the result of the crowd noise on top of a confusing defensive look of the Jets. At one point in the second half, the Cowboys took a pair consecutive pre-snap penalties that pushed them back into a hole.
“That’s huge for our defense, going from a third-and-five to a third-and-10, just from a quarterback’s standpoint, it’s like, 'God, we’re killing ourselves.' You’re shooting yourself in the foot. You can’t [do that],”Sanchez said. “That’s huge. We need to play well at home. We want to give our fans support. Our fans love watching us play well at home. It’s got to happen and I think that’s what we’re working towards.”
This week, the Jets welcome in a team that beat them at home two years ago in the Jaguars.
Coming off a bye week in 2009, New York was handed its second-straight loss of the season by the Jags in a 24-22 game ended by a Maurice Jones-Drew kneel-down at the goalline.
“This one is huge and this one is easy because all you have to do is pop on the tape from two years ago when we played Jacksonville,” Ryan said. “We pride ourselves on being a physical football team and all that. They handed it to us. They imposed their will on us. They ran the ball better than we did. They were more physical than we were. They came up with three turnovers, so this one won’t be hard to get our team up for. We know what happened the last time we played them. They beat us at our place, so we’ll let the video do most of the talking.”
Follow Nick @NickStDenis
Tweet
