Jets Season Hardly A Failure
Monday, January 24, 2011 at 10:06AM 
By JOHN P. WISEOne Great Season
Those who follow and write about sports love the post mortem.
We love to wield our pens and offer up reasons why a football team's season was a success or a failure, as if only black and white options are available to describe something so rife with gray area the last eight months.
From my view, any team that wins 13 games, including back-to-back postseason triumps on the home fields of the game's top two current quarterbacks, is a team that should be proud of its accomplishments.
Sure the sentiment does little good for the campers in Florham Park. Their Lombardi-Trophy-or-bust approach to the 2010 NFL season was well-documented, not to mention meticulously dissected and overanalyzed.
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These Jets gave us plenty to talk about, plenty to write about and plenty to judge.
They were built for the now, and they told us as much. They weren't cultivating a long-term foundation so much as they were building a short-term champion.
And they didn't reach their goal. The quest for that elusive Super Bowl crown will just have to wait another year. No panic button necessary.
Perhaps I'm considering things as they appear on paper. You can't ignore the second-year tandem of coach Rex Ryan and quarterback Mark Sanchez, and their four road playoff wins the last 12 months.
You can't ignore the Jets' smash-mouth defense, assembled for January, built to win the type of game they somehow found a way to lose Sunday in Pittsburgh.
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But I get that the context can't be ignored either, and that's where the critics come in. The bombast, the bluster, the bravado — all season long — didn't catch up with the Jets or contribute to their failure. It just made them look weaker than we thought when they couldn't back it all up as a Super Bowl invitation hung in the balance.
(I was asked on a television show Monday morning if it could have been the cold. I opined it might have had less to do with the weather and more to do with the Steelers.)
That's what happens when you bark confidently in the direction of your dreams. You're a prophet when you reach the destination on schedule. You head back to the drawing table when you don't.
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