The Patriots could use their Gillette Stadium game field as a bulletin board and fill it up 10 times over with all of the material the Jets have given them in the last two seasons.
But there’s only one thing that really truly matters when the Pats and Jets square off Sunday: If Revis Island has a golf course, the Patriots want the Jets teeing off there Monday morning.
When the Patriots and Jets met up at Gillette Stadium in Week 13, countless players in the New England locker room were asked about the Jets’ trash-talking ways. It was redundant and annoying — for those on both sides of the mic — and the answers were all similar.
In short, the Patriots said they could only worry about what the Patriots could control, and anything that echoed from New York to New England would have no impact on the scoreboard. That notion couldn’t have been any truer, as the Patriots laid a 45-3, open-handed slap on the Jets’ red faces.
While the Jets won the war of words with a Patriots team that didn’t care to engage, it was the Pats who proved they were the better team and sent the Jets on a late-season tailspin, which set up this week’s very meeting at the same location.
In more candid conversations that week, it was easy to get a different feeling at ground zero. Obviously, the Patriots heard all the talk, but they had their minds set on a different mentality. If they needed bulletin-board material to get amped up for that game, they were in this profession for the wrong reasons. The Jets’ comments couldn’t have provided any more of a pregame boost than the Patriots could get out of a high-energy iPod playlist.
With everything at stake in Week 13 — the AFC East lead, the top seed in the playoffs, a first-round bye, home-field advantage — the Patriots drowned out that noise because it simply didn’t matter. And because they handled it better, they were relaxing this past weekend while the Jets fought tooth and nail to beat the Colts.
Now, the Patriots are well-rested, and the Jets are coming off a short week to get ready for a second road game. By Sunday’s opening kickoff, the Jets will have been on three flights in 10 days and dropped a seemingly infinite amount of verbal jabs in the Patriots’ direction. At some point, that has to get tiring, right?
There really isn’t a right or wrong way for a team to go about its business, and the Jets can point to their 2-2 record against the Patriots in the last two seasons to justify that if they’d like. The Jets have been successful during Ryan’s tenure because they play the way they speak: loud, reckless and with plenty of aggression.
The Patriots, despite a roster that has all but turned over since their last Super Bowl title, have also mastered their own way to manage the week before a game, and they’ve been doing it longer than the Jets. It will be more of the same this week.
There is only one thing that carries any weight Sunday in Foxboro, and that’s the final score. Besides, a Patriots victory most certainly won’t be enough to muzzle the Jets, who would likely spend the offseason saying they were the better team, wait till next time and yada, yada, yada.
The sole purpose of winning Sunday is to advance to the AFC Championship Game, and that will be more than enough to get the Patriots fired up. That’s what they believed six weeks ago, and it won’t change now.
