For all the ground and pound, for all the down-in-the-trenches dirtiness of the New York Jets, they are essentially a northern team. They like to swarm in the clear, crisp air of an autumn night, like bats feasting on the insects at twilight. Rex Ryan loves nothing more than the quick brutality of a single blitzer, unimpeded on the way to the quarterback, ending a play before it ever started. In short, the New York Jets are not a swamp team. The difficulty in going to Miami is thus a difficulty of geologic eras. It is a Cenozoic Era team (The Jets) traveling back in space and time in order to do battle with a Mesozoic Era team (The Dolphins). Or it is air (Jets) versus water (Dolphins)? Or it is man versus dinosaur? Sometimes, when the Miami Dolphins go in to their wildcat offense and all hell breaks loose as a pocket of running-backs-cum-quarterbacks dash madly into the scrum I am sure that I’m watching the dinosaurs play. Somehow, the New York Jets rose above the ferns and the algae-clogged water and the reptilian scales. Perhaps it was because they had one of the dinosaurs on their own team, Jason Taylor, a man who, after twelve long seasons in Miami’s Mesozoic lost world, had become a Jet in the off-season. Who knows what kind of strange physiological changes had to occur for this transformation to become reality? Probably, he went through a summer’s agony, writhing and squirming in a football-shaped egg with all the other new Jets while the necessary changes were wrought upon them.
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