There was a lot of chatter this week leading up to Sunday's game between the Jets and the Chargers.
You had the Rex Ryan-Norv Turner flap, you had questions about the Mark Sanchez-Plaxico Burress relationship, you had the Darrelle Revis-Mike Francesa kerfuffle and you had defensive coordinator Mike Pettine trash talking Chargers quarterback Philip Rivers.
The game was going to be the final word on all of those issues and the Jets won each and every one of them by coming back from 11 down at the half to beat the Chargers 27-21.
Burress and Sanchez hooked up for three touchdowns in the kind of performance that fulfilled the wildest dreams of the Jets when they decided to roll the dice on the ex-Giant ex-con over the summer. Every time the Jets got the ball in the red zone, Sanchez went to Burress and it paid off, thanks to the kind of coaching that made Ryan suggest he'd have been a more successful coach than Turner.
Burress' third touchdown was exactly the same as his first two, as he beat the wildly overmatched Antoine Cason in single coverage. Having Cason try to keep doing something that he clearly could not do is about the Norv Turnerest thing that Norv Turner has ever done.
You could excuse the first one since Burress hadn't done much for the Jets this season, but to leave him with such an easy task twice more is pure idiocy. Idiocy the Jets were happy to have after two early turnovers and a slew of other mistakes put them in that deep halftime hole, but idiocy nonetheless.
The Revis issue wasn't really settled as we'll have to wait for Francesa to weigh in on whether he was guilty of pass interference on Sunday's game-changing interception. A Rivers pass went off Vincent Jackson's hands right into Revis' paws in the fourth quarter and Revis took it deep into San Diego territory to set up the go-ahead touchdown to Burress.
We're kidding about needing Francesa's opinion as there was no penalty. We also don't need his opinion on Revis as a player, as everyone is already well aware of the way the man can impact football games whenever he's given the opportunity.
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Finally, there's Rivers who was terrible in the second half as the Chargers stopped scoring points and let the Jets back into the game. His biggest sin was an interception on the drive after Revis' pick when he threw the ball right into Kyle Wilson's hands to set up Nick Folk's final field goal.
And then Rivers was awful on the final drive of the game, looking nothing like the star quarterback he is considered to be by most observers. The Jets held tough and got a huge fourth win of the season on a day that looked like it might be a season ender in the early going.
This was the win the Jets needed to get people off their backs for a couple of weeks and their chances of making something out of the season look much better today as a result. Not a bad way to start a bye week.
