The Afternoon After: Specter of pain remains a constant presence

Here are my weekly football thoughts. No LT sightings this week.

Feeling his pain

Pain is such a part of life that we take for granted the times when we don’t feel it. Never again will I do that after a year in which much of it was spent dealing with injuries of various sorts, and mine were brought on solely by running, the repetitive stress of pounding your lower body against the pavement again and again.

Football pain is on a whole other plane. And in a sport predicated on sheer physicality and enormous husks crashing into each other haphazardly, something catastrophic can happen in an instant. Other sports have injuries, obviously – I have a colleague who acutely observes that all pitchers are injured by sheer definition of what they have to do to play the game – but it’s nothing like what we see in football.

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The afternoon after: Jets need to overcome history of teases

Though I know football, it’s not really my thing. But I’ll give it a shot. Here are a few observations I have from watching some games this weekend.

  • This year's Joe Flacco?I think the Jets are for real, but it’s tough to truly commit to them. In the past, every time they won a huge game and it seemed like they were going to take that leap to the upper echelon of the NFL, they lost their next game in crushing fashion and it was back to square one. It’s rare you find a franchise as snakebit as they have been, at least since Namath’s knees went. But the defense truly does look legit, Mark Sanchez looks like the quarterback they’ve been waiting for perhaps since Namath – i.e. a star, albeit one not asked to carry the mail just yet – and you have to be impressed that not only did they say they were going to beat the Patriots, they went out and did it. Challenging the Patriots is like calling out Floyd Mayweather – usually not a good idea. But they pulled it off. Their next three games are home against the Titans, at the Saints and at the Dolphins – two explosive offenses and a divisional rival. If they go 2-1 in those games, things may be different.

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