Dear the Jets

You're welcome. Yeah, that's right. You beat the Patriots. Way to go. Good on you. You slayed the Brady-Manning dragon in successive weeks, and now everyone is pulling for you to pull the AFC hat trick en route to the Superbowl by cutting the always classy Ben Roethlisberger down a few pegs.

So I say again: you're welcome.

In December of 2008 the New York football Giants gave up a ton of points and lost to these same (or similar) New England Patriots in a regular season game, only to beat them a few weeks later in the greatest game thing that has ever been played happened. Sound familiar?

There are still no words.

How did the Giants do it? How did they beat the team of the 21st century? They did something that no team had been able to do for most of the last decade: they designed a game plan that neutralized Tom Brady.

First, you run the ball. It eats the clock and keeps Brady off of the field. Next, you blitz like crazy. Brady hates to throw under pressure, hates to get hit, and needs time to adjust to it. And third -- and by far the most important -- is that you change it up before he can adjust to the pressure. You mix it up at the line of scrimmage with defensive audibles and fake looks. So when you've blitzed him every down for three, four, five series in a row, you drop back into coverage and he has nowhere to go.

Sound familiar? It should, because that's exactly what the Jets did to the P-EE-triots (Simms, Phil) on Sunday night. They were a bit less effective with the run than the Giants were in 2008 (though they still would have held the ball longer than the Pats but for a seven-plus minute drive in the fourth quarter). But they were almost perfect on defense: Brady was hit seven times, sacked five and forced to throw his first interception since he was eight years old. He was under pressure from every angle, but then suddenly he wasn't. Expecting pressure, he would instead have all day to throw, but no one was open. Of his sixteen incomplete passes, at least five or six were balls that were just thrown away.

There is no doubt in my mind that the Patriots were the best team in the NFL this year. To beat them, the Jets needed to execute a perfect game plan perfectly. The players get credit for the execution, but they have the 2007-08 Giants to thank for the blueprints.