Let me start by saying that I don’t want to be here writing about Tom Brady or the Jets or Football. The start of August, deep in the dog days of Summer, should not be spent talking about the upcoming football season let alone the ghosts of Football past. I think even the most optimistic Jets and Giants fan are more than content to continue watching the NY baseball teams vomit all over themselves nightly than start the brain rotting exercise of how to convince themselves on how our football teams can somehow make the playoffs. We all know the mind virus of fan driven delusion will start the Inception process soon. Early August is for day dreaming about every meeting on your Outlook calendar getting cancelled for the next three weeks so you can justify sneaking out early on Friday and going to a beach bar. It is for patting yourself on the back for making the wise decision of deciding not to  commit to caring about baseball unless your team is already in the playoffs. It is about telling yourself to enjoy every sun drenched summer minute while sneakily checking where you stored your fall flannels. I guess this is just another grudge I must add to Tom Brady’s tab. In a lifetime of cheap shots, this is just  another low blow at the little guy that society says I should just let happen so you can all yuck it up at our expense. 

And for the most part, you are all right. There isn’t much that I can say. What defense can the mouse make against the cat? For most of Brady’s reign he batted us around, toyed with us, and frankly chewed us up. The thing that I can’t reconcile, then and now, is when did America start finding it fun to go after the Underdog? It’s funny how a Country that always professes to love the underdog always  hated when the Jets got their punches in, the most  memorable in 2010. This goes beyond Brady and extends to our  moments of victory over the Colts, Chargers, and Bengals. You could see the stink faces galore all over Sports Center. It makes sense when our Corporate Overlords rally against the teams that ruin their carefully pruned forecasts and headlines, preventing them from marketing Dynasty Headlines and plummeting big advertisement sales. We are all savvy enough consumers, in the year of lord 2025 to know that golden quarterbacks and marches to Destiny draw eyeballs, advertisers, and storylines. What I don’t understand is the cackling and heckling from the other NFL fan bases. With a couple notable exceptions, Brady and the Patriots slapped you all around for two decades as much so or more so than ourselves. 

The 80s and 90s can be defined by the underdog movie genre. The Mighty Ducks, Rudy, Angels in the Outfield. The Little Giants. Too many to count. Ironically, the Jets were one of the few teams to have their Little Giants moment against the Patriots. Sadly, nothing as brilliant and as satisfying as the moment the Big Giants had against Brady and the Pats. We didn’t grow up watching Fiefel goes West cheering for the cats to find more efficient ways to eat mice. We didn’t grow up rooting for the Little Cowboys or the Big Cowboys either. To my generation of fans, the whole spirit of football and the beautiful, brutal, hateful game that we love has always been the mantra poignantly stated in that movie. Even if that team beats you 99 times out of 100, that still leaves you one time they didn’t. Brady can make clowns of us and take shots at us from the podium for the rest of his life. Fate, fortune, and golden arm (and constantly edited rule book) have given him that right. What I am missing is the part where the rest of you aren’t also wearing white make up, red noses and wearing frizzy wigs with us. You are all in the clown car with us, packed 20 deep, waiting for circus master Goodell to trot us to entertain the paying crowds. So you can all join in laughing at the Goddamn Jets, as long as you know you are part of the joke too. Personally, I thought the funny parts of his speech were watching his mouth move while the rest of his face stayed as still as the bronze doppelgänger’s they plopped in front of Gillette. If the Patriots waited a couple of years, they could have fixed plastic Tom to the base and saved themselves a couple hundred grand.

 The past is the past and Tom Brady is entitled to another day in the Sunshine receiving the adoration of a fan base to who he delivered years of glory and triumph. I am not here to try and rewrite history and no one is more aware of the laughably awful moments to which the Jets have subjected us. Patriot fans don’t need to reconcile the irony of their complaints about Mahomes and Chief favoritism to their own time of league domination. Winners don’t need to go through self reflection. They can overlook ugly, bothersome facts and fissures. Since Kraft and Goodell had an ugly and public break up, we can all look past their years of holding hands and kissing in public. There was NEVER any make-up sex between those two nor documented accounts of Kraft being Goodell’s biggest private supporter in the League’s Halls. I don’t even see the need to make any historical analogies comparing Roger Goodell to the elected Holy Roman Emperor in the Thirty years war nor the league owners as the various Dukes and Princes who constantly warred, bickered, and allied to gain supremacy within the Empire. Just because the Duke Robert Kraft of Bavaria constantly schemed and politicked to get his own expanded crown, that  did not mean they would let any of the upstart Margraves or Counts jeopardize the league’s revenue growth. And God forbid the Swedes be allowed to become the arbiters of the Empire. Digression aside, certain facts of life are as true now as they were then. The best bet is a sure bet. And the commissioners stated job description is to take away any gambling when it comes to revenue growth. 

With this mind, we might as well have a little fun and think about what statues we would put in front of Met Life that best exemplified the few bright moments of doomed resistance during those torturous decades of Brady’s reign. 

1. Braylon Edwards mid back flipping over Bart Scott blowing into a Kleenex tissue. We had one shingling  moment of glory and celebration and I am going to get our goddamn money’s worth in memorializing it
2. A statue of a quarterback sitting legs straight, shoulders slumped, and head down. Completely ambiguous on to who the qb could be and representative of all the random, nameless quarterbacks that have been dejected on the field in the Meadowlands. In no way an indirect shot at a classic picture of a hall fame quarterback experiencing the most excruciating level of misery 
3. Two people doing Ji Juitsi. There haven’t been many happy Jet football moments over the years so I thought it might be worth celebrating all the other great entertainment events that people get to enjoy at the Meadowlands Sports Complex. In order to make sure we are extra inclusive I think it would be great if it was a statue of a man and a woman engaged in a Guard Mount. I have a Super  Model or two I can suggest for inspiration to the artist commissioned to create the piece.

Leave your suggestions in the comments. 

Fuck you, Tom Brady. Even though you are hundred percent right that if I ever see that statue I will be throwing a beer at it.