HORRORS HAVE JUST BEGUN FOR EDWARDS ONLY BEGINNING:
Herman Edwards said
yesterday one loss won't shake his faith in his
football team, but, according to Wallace Matthews,
it's just a matter of time before Jets chew up
their new head coach.
N.Y. Post: Francis Specker
September 10, 2001 -- THE unraveling of Herman Edwards is going to be a sad thing to witness. It may not come today, or even next week or next month, but if you know the Jets, you know it is coming.
By all accounts, the new Jets coach is a man of unimpeachable character and seemingly limitless optimism. All of that is about to change, because it always does.
Herman Edwards, the quintessential right-place/right-time guy, is now most definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Ask Al Groh or Bill Parcells or Bill Belichick or Rich Kotite or Pete Carroll or Bruce Coslet. And that just covers the 1990s.
In their own special way, the Jets are the most consistent franchise in the history of sports.
Players come and go, ownership changes, coaching staffs are hired, fired and re-hired, but the bottom line remains the same. The Jets are consistently bad, consistently disappointing, consistently astonishing in their capacity to find ever more entertaining ways in which to lose.
And as rough as they are on their fans, they are even worse on their coaches.
You know those old pictures of Abraham Lincoln that show the terrible toll the Civil War took on him, how he looked like he had aged 20 years for each of his five years in the White House? The same thing happens to Jets coaches.
In fact, a few more games like yesterday's and Herman Edwards will start to look like Abraham Lincoln.
Historically, the Jets chew up their coaches the way a war chews up the infantrymen. The Jets took their first bite out of Herman Edwards yesterday with their 45-24 loss to the Colts in their season opener.
"It's only one game," he said. "I'm not gonna let one game disrupt the 15 we still have to play."
Clearly, he has no idea of the horrors that await him.
During training camp, Edwards was so immersed in his task he slept just five hours a night. Now that he has actually seen his new team play, he'll be lucky to sleep at all.
"I don't even think this is a test for Herman," Curtis Martin said. "He's a man of strong character. I don't think this will even budge Herman."
Forgive Martin his boyish enthusiasm. He is still relatively new here.
The Jets already have ruined men of great character and men of no character. They scared Belichick away before he even took the job. They reduced Groh, a snarling Parcells clone the day he started, to a squeaking gerbil the day he left after one miserable season.
How long will it take for them to erode the confidence of Herman Edwards?
A lesser man, of course, would have had his faith shaken the moment that Marvin Jones intercepted Peyton Manning in the end zone - and then promptly fumbled the ball right back to Manning.
And if that didn't do it, how about when Vinnny Testaverde collided with David Loverne, a 300-pound guard inserted into the Jets backfield as a decoy, and the ball popped into the hands of a 280-pound backup defensive end with the unlikely name of Chukie Nwokorie?
Nwokorie lugged it 97 yards for the back-breaking touchdown.
It took so long that people who were sitting in their seats when the play started were on the George Washington Bridge by the time Nwokorie scored.
Still, no Jet could stop him.
The play reminded some of Herman Edwards' own career highlight, when as a member of the Eagles he took a fumbled handoff from Joe Pisarcik intended for Larry Csonka and went 37 yards for a game-winning touchdown against the Giants in 1979.
But when you are head coach of the New York Jets, plays like that don't happen for you.
They happen to you.
"A game like this is not going to change how I feel about this football team," Edwards said. "Remember, this was the first game, not the last one."
Considering the history, Herman Edwards' last game with the Jets is guaranteed to be a lot like his first. |
