JET NOTES
Sunday morning, in the hours before the Jets’ victory over the Raiders in Oakland, Vinny Testaverde told Herman Edwards he was willing to go to Japan to play in a playoff game.
The Jets won’t have to travel that far for their wild-card playoff game. But they do have to fly across the country for the second time in less than a week.
Based on last night’s 19-3 Ravens’ win over the Vikings in the NFL’s regular-season finale, the Jets became the No. 6 seed in the AFC playoff tournament, and that means a rematch with the No. 3 seed Raiders on Saturday in Oakland – a/k/a “The Black Hole.”
The NFL hasn’t yet announced the time, but it’s most likely to be an 8 p.m. kickoff.
That means the Jets will be faced with trying to defeat the Raiders twice in less than a week at Oakland, where before Sunday they hadn’t won since 1962 (0-8-1).
That, however, is just fine with the 10-6 Jets, who enter the playoffs having won two of their last three games while the 10-6 Raiders are staggering, having lost their last three and four of their last six.
“There’s only six [teams] left and for you to go where you need to go you’ve got to beat them all,” Edwards said. “It’ll be another tough football game. The Raiders know that and we know that.”
Edwards said, with thoughts of possibly having to play the Raiders again this week, “there are some wrinkles” they held back from using.
“When you know your opponent, players feel more comfortable playing them, because they know the basic schemes on offense and defense,” Edwards said. “Then it boils down to execution.”
The Jets will practice full today and tomorrow and have a short morning session Thursday before departing for the West Coast later that day, allowing for an extra day to acclimate to the time change, something Edwards did last week with the team.
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Edwards again praised the job punter Tom Tupa did with the hold on John Hall‘s game-winning FG. The James Dearth snap was very low and Tupa somehow got the ball upright without ruining Hall’s rhythm.
“Tupa did a nice job holding it, because [the snap] didn’t look good; it was about as flat as a pancake,” Edwards said.