The first goal of every NFL team is securing a playoff berth. Historically, teams with 10 wins get to the playoffs. A Jets’ victory over the 49ers Sunday at Giants Stadium not only gets them to 5-0 for the first time in franchise history, but it gets them halfway to that 10-win benchmark.
“We know going 4-0 doesn’t entitle you to anything at the end of the season,” Wayne Chrebet said yesterday. “We pretty much know that 10 wins generally makes the playoffs. When you get to 5-0 you’re halfway there to getting 10 wins as fast as you can.
“Then you can fight for home-field and a bye and all that stuff. The statistics are in your favor, but it doesn’t guarantee you anything. It just would put us in an awfully good position.”
As the Jets are positioning themselves in this early part of the season, they have quietly been mimicking the formula their rival Patriots have been using en route to their record 19-game winning streak, dating back to last season.
The Jets know their modest four-game winning streak out of the box this season, though one of the best starts in franchise history, is a mere blip on the radar screen for a team like the Patriots, but they’re trying to emulate the one-game-at-a-time mantra New England has followed.
“We can take a page out of New England’s book in that they take everything a game at a time,” Jets TE Anthony Becht said. “When you think about winning 19 straight you don’t think about the big picture. You can’t. It’s possible to do that. If you have a team smart enough to take each game as if it’s the only game of the season, then you can get on a roll.
“Your goal as a team every season is the faster you get to 10 wins the better chance you have to get to the playoffs,” Becht went on. “If you can get to five without losing any games, you’re only halfway to 10 and then you have other goals after that.”
Since 1994, 13 teams have gone 5-0 or better and 12 of them have made the playoffs. Five of those teams made it to the Super Bowl with three of them winning the NFL title. The only team of those 13 that failed to make the playoffs was last year’s Vikings, who finished 9-7 after starting 6-0.
This is why Herman Edwards has set a mini-goal this week for his team to make a little piece of history in its own record books by becoming the first team in Jets history to start 5-0.
“It is definitely something we want to do,” Curtis Martin said. “It hasn’t been done. This is our chance to make a footprint in Jet history and it is right there before us. All we have to do is prepare and get it done.”
Jets center Kevin Mawae said, “It would be a great accomplishment for this program and this team, but if you start off 5-0 and lay an egg for the last 10, 11 games of the season, it doesn’t really matter. It’s just a matter of taking it one week at a time.
“The biggest example is New England. They don’t look ahead. They don’t look at the records. They just look at the next week, and I think that is what has allowed them to be 19-0 right now in the last 19 games.”
