Mangini needs to let Favre wing it for Jets- Newsday

Mangini needs to let Favre wing it for Jets BY ERIK BOLAND | erik.boland@newsday.com
9:05 PM EDT, September 16, 2008
Eric Mangini was perturbed.

Well, as perturbed as the stoic Jets coach can get in public.

Asked several different ways Monday about the three consecutive Thomas Jones runs called by offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer that netted zero yards near the Patriots' goal line in the second quarter, resulting in an unfulfilling field goal, Mangini sighed.

"If we knew ahead of time what was going to work and what wasn't going to work, we definitely would call those runs that are going to work," Mangini said.

"Yeah, we have of a lot of different plays that we can call there," Mangini said of the run-run-run sequence. "If I knew which one was definitely going to hit, I would call it."

His sarcasm was warranted.

Coaches take their share of sniper-fire sarcasm -- in print and on the airwaves -- by reporters and everyone else who have the benefit of calling the plays after the games have ended. Returning fire -- and the passive-aggressive manner in which Mangini did it qualifies -- is fair.

But his answers also obscured the overriding problem with those play calls, which were a microcosm of the Brett Favre era with the Jets thus far: hamstringing the quarterback with game plans at times conservative enough to seem scripted by the late William F. Buckley.

One glaring case from Week 1 in Miami was when the Jets took over at their 18-yard line with 3:21 left protecting a 20-14 lead. After three Jones runs, including on third-and-7, the Jets punted and Miami had the ball at its 39 with 1:43 left, a chance to win it. The Dolphins nearly did, denied by Darrelle Revis' acrobatic end zone interception with five seconds left.

The rationale with taking the ball out of Favre's hands there was the percentages being against the Dolphins driving the long field inside of two minutes with no timeouts.

But what separates the great baseball managers from the average ones is the ability to stare down the percentages and conventional wisdom -- the dreaded "book" -- and say, "not this time."

Or, to bring it back on topic, saying, "We traded for Brett Favre because of the possibilities he brings, not only with what's in our playbook but what isn't in the playbook."

Which, again, can be applied to the bridge-to-nowhere play-calling on the goal line Sunday. Nothing wrong in theory with running the ball behind a rebuilt offensive line, especially with the Jets having some success to that point on the ground.

But . . .

Why was it again the organization pulled the trigger on the Favre deal?

Right.

The three straight runs were also wholly inconsistent with what amounts to a Jets core value.

Spoken by Mangini almost as often as those values -- trust, communication, focus and finish -- is the description of the Jets as a "game plan-specific team."

An example: Asked before the Miami game if Chad Pennington might have an advantage having spent the first part of training camp with the Jets, Mangini said the quarterback might have some insight, "but we're a very game plan-specific team."

Basically meaning this: constructing a weekly game plan that attacks a given opponent's weakness rather than a this-is-what-we-do, try-and-stop-it approach.

Which Sunday, down by the goal line, should have meant not attacking New England's strength, which is its front seven.

"You can learn a line from a win and a book from a defeat," Paul Brown, often credited with the attack-the-weakness approach, once said.

The Jets don't need to take a book's worth of lessons from Sunday into Monday night's game in San Diego. The 0-2 Chargers are this week's poster child for "desperate" after losing by a total of three points to the Panthers and Broncos. The Chargers might be better than their record and there might be a flukish element to their last-second losses, but they've also given up an average of 293.5 yards passing per game. Only the horrific Rams (327.5) have been worse.

Good thing the Jets are game-plan specific. The Chargers don't look as if they can cover the pass, and the Jets have just the quarterback to exploit that weakness.

They need to let him at least try to do it.
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