Time, like beauty, exists in the eyes of the beholder.
Five days can seem like a brief moment in time or it can seem like ages. In the case of the Jets, the last five days have seemed like the entire football season.
It was just five days ago, after all, that the Jets held an opportunity to step into the driver's seat for the AFC East title and make themselves into one of the leading contenders for the conference title by beating the Patriots.
It feels like they stood on that particular doorstep about 20 years ago after watching Thursday night's pathetic loss to the Broncos.
Two losses in five days have left the Jets looking a lot more like a team that should be drafting in the first few minutes next April than a team that has a serious shot of making it back to the playoffs.
That's how complete their breakdown has been over the last 120 minutes of football, eight quarters that have erased anything good that came before.
It's true that they were five minutes away from avoiding such a dismal review of their performance. If not for the defense's total failure, they would have won an ugly game by playing just well enough and that would have been okay given the short turnaround to a road game.
But they couldn't hold on and couldn't take care of business when they knew exactly what was going to come their way. On the last drive, the entire team was like Antonio Cromartie on Tim Tebow's touchdown run: They wanted nothing to do with making a play and ran away from the moment as if they were afraid instead of confident in their abilities.
Maybe they were. It certainly looked that way as Nick Folk was missing field goals, T.J. Conley was botching punts and Joe McKnight fumbled for the second straight week. And the team is clearly terrified of Mark Sanchez, although there's actually good reason for that fear.
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It's hard to understand how a team could fall so far so fast without looking beyond the players on the field to the people getting them ready to play. For a team that has shown up huge so many times to totally fall flat two weeks in a row should defy logic, but it happens so often with the Jets that it just seems routine.
The most amazing thing about Rex Ryan's tenure as Jets coach isn't the run of huge wins that he's pulled off over the years. It is the number of stunningly awful losses he's taken on his chin in less than three seasons.
There are the two blowout losses to the Patriots, Sanchez's six-interception game against Buffalo, the shutout to the Packers, the Falcons loss that had Ryan killing the Jets off prematurely in his first season and last year's debacle against the Dolphins. None of them were as bad as what happened on Thursday night.
Despite the evidence, calling this Jets outfit a bad team is too simple a way to sum things up. What they are is a team that isn't as good as it thinks it is coached by a staff that either will not or can not get the team to believe that so that they can avoid steaming disasters on a semi-regular basis.
When you look at the Jets' remaining schedule, it is pretty easy to talk yourself into another big run that lands them back into the postseason. But doing so forces you to look back into the distant past because there's nothing about the first 10 games of this season that should make you believe this team is capable of doing anything good consistently enough to avoid the rubbish bin of mediocrity.
Josh Alper is a writer living in New York City. You can follow him on Twitter and he is also a contributor to Pro Football Talk.
