The 3-0 Jets’ great “Downplay the Keyshawn Johnson factor” machine was humming yesterday as the hype for Sunday’s potentially contentious showdown with Johnson and the 3-0 Buccaneers in Tampa began in force.

“I don’t have any thoughts about it,” Al Groh said flatly when asked about facing his team’s former star player whom he traded amidst controversy in the offseason.

“Mum is the word on that; I could care less,” center Kevin Mawae said yesterday. “We’ve moved on. We moved on in training camp. Some people stay in place and keep running on treadmills. Some people are on the ground and start making headway. That’s what we’ve done.

“[Johnson] is just another player. He’s a great player, but he’s not the [Bucs’] entire team there and he wasn’t the entire team here.”

Left guard Randy Thomas called this “any other week.”

“I don’t even think Keyshawn is an issue,” running back Curtis Martin said.

“We’re not playing Keyshawn Johnson, we’re playing the Tampa Bay Buccaneers,” cornerback Aaron Glenn said.

Johnson, whose fulltime job seems to ripping Groh and ridiculing former teammate Wayne Chrebet to anyone who’ll listen and whose part-time job is playing receiver for the Bucs, told a reporter that he’ll refuse to shake Groh’s hand if it’s extended Sunday afternoon at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa.

“That’s his prerogative,” Groh said yesterday of Johnson’s silly words. “I don’t have any comment on it besides that.”

Asked yesterday if he’d shake Johnson’s hand at the game, Groh said, “If that’s convenient, I wouldn’t have any problem with it.”

Asked when the last time he spoke to Johnson was, Groh said, “Back in the spring.”

Asked if he harbors any ill feelings toward Johnson considering the inordinate amount of cheap shots Johnson has lobbed his way since the trade, Groh said, “I don’t have any resentment.”

Asked if he has any sense of vindication about being 3-0 and winning without Johnson when so many said he couldn’t, Groh said, “I don’t think I can be vindicated from anything since there’s still a chance I can be sitting up here at 3-13 someday.”

Based on the way Groh’s Jets have been playing, 3-13 seems out of the question. In fact, failure to make the playoffs doesn’t even seem like a viable possibility, barring a rash of severe injuries. From here, the Jets need to go only 7-6 the rest of the way to finish 10-6, which is a virtual lock for a playoff berth.

That, of course, is not the way Groh is coaching or talking to his players. Much like the week leading up to the Monday night game against the Patriots, the players have been warned to stay away from the non-game-related quotes when speaking to reporters.

As for the 3-0 start, Groh would say only that it would allow the Jets to “stay in the hunt for a while.”

“I’ve been in too many of these things [to become too excited],” Groh said. “We’re 3-0. I don’t think it leads to anything. You win games, pile up wins so that at a point you can say you’re in the hunt. I think after three games, the hunt is still sorting itself out.”

And so, in the last game before their Oct. 1 bye weekend, the Jets are off to Tampa this weekend with a chance to leave the month of September with a 4-0 record.

“We just need to do what we’ve been doing the last three weeks. It’s been working. It’s been nice. Why stop now?” Thomas said.

“This is a big game for us, because [the Bucs] are the NFC favorites to go to the Super Bowl,” Mawae said.

“Being 3-0 feels good, but we’ve got 13 games to go and there are definitely now rewards for going 3-0,” Martin said. “That’s where our heads are and that’s a good place for our heads to be.”

Asked again about shaking Groh’s hand, Johnson said, “There won’t be any handshakes, not at all. [Groh] probably won’t come up to me since he knows that I’m not interested in talking to him.”

Johnson’s bitterness toward Groh is based on the fact that he believes it was all Groh and not Bill Parcells who wanted to move him.

Yesterday, Groh called trading Johnson “a challenging decision.”

“I wasn’t looking for support, I just did what I had to do,” Groh said. “I thought and thought and thought [about making the trade], but I couldn’t factor in how I was going to be perceived. I say it a lot, because I think it a lot, but I just coach the team. Just coaching the team doesn’t deal with perceptions.”