JET NOTES
Fallout from the Wayne Chrebet missed catch.
A day later, neither Chrebet nor Ray Lucas had seen the replay and neither was in a hurry to see it.
“I don’t want to see it,” Lucas said. “I just want to forget about the whole game. When I was laying on the ground, I just saw the ball go out of bounds and I couldn’t believe that was it, that there wasn’t another chance. It was heart-wrenching. I didn’t want to get up.
“On the sideline, Wayne came up to me and, because I didn’t see it, I said, ‘Where was it?’ He said he could have gotten it. I’d say 99 out of 100 times he catches that ball … maybe 100 out of 100.”
Chrebet said he was consoled by a number of teammates, including Vinny Testaverde, Dwight Stone and Quinn Early on the plane ride home Sunday night.
“I haven’t really been in this situation before and I’ve always been used to being the one to console, saying, ‘Don’t worry about it, get the next one,'” Chrebet said. “I was just thinking to myself, ‘I’m going to listen to my own advice.’ Obviously I would like to have made the play. I was upset about it, but there’s five more games left this year, I’ve had a lot of things happen in my career to be happy for and given the opportunity again, yeah, I’m going to make that play.”
Bill Parcells all but conceded that the Jets are out of the playoff hunt now, saying, “I see probably five teams in the AFC that will win 11 games. It looks like that to me. That Central Division [based on the easy schedules for 10-1 Jacksonville and 9-2 Tennessee], it looks like there’s going to have to be a bus accident before they miss the playoffs.
“I’m not looking at the standings, but I just think it would be a difficult task.”
Parcells said one play he’d like to have back from Sunday was the third-and-19 on the next-to-last play, saying he might have liked Lucas, who was already scrambling mightily, to run for half of the yards. Lucas, however, said yesterday running wasn’t an option.
“I was about to have a heart attack,” Lucas said. “I saw Dedric [Ward] in the back of the end zone and I could barely get it out there to him. I was sucking some serious wind.”