Wild-card weekend Monday 10-pack | ProFootballTalk
4. Patriots have to be puckering.
In early December, when the Ravens and Steelers and Jets and Patriots got together for prime-time games on consecutive nights, we suspected that the second game of the season between these division rivals would merely determine the location for the third game.
But when the Patriots dismantled the Jets, running up the score to finish the night with a 45-3 win, we feared that the Pats were given the Jets fodder to fire themselves up for a playoff meeting — until we realized that the Pats were hoping to induce a tailspin that would wash the Jets right out of the postseason altogether.
If that was the objective, it didn’t work. After losing six days later to the Dolphins, the Jets pulled together a win in Pittsburgh and gained plenty of confidence by beating the Colts in Indianapolis. Now, the Jets are heading back to Foxboro, and they’ll surely find extra motivation in the trouncing they endured.
Of course, the Jets have a bad habit of talking too much, and there’s a decent chance they’ll squander the moral high ground by talking tough and otherwise riling up a Patriots team that otherwise has to be thinking that there’s no guarantee that they’ll do in January what they managed to do in December.
So with the Pats having everything to lose and the Jets having everything to gain, there’s a chance that the Jets could shock the team that everyone assumes will advance to the Super Bowl and win it.
