JET NOTES

With Doug Brien’s two game-winning field goal attempts having been missed, almost as soon as the Steelers made the Jets pay in overtime by winning the game with a field goal of their own, there were many who wondered: Can the Jets bring Brien back next season?

Brien, after all, might be looked upon as a Bill Buckner type by Jets fans.

“This is going to take a long time to get over,” Brien conceded quietly while standing dazed in front of his locker after the loss Saturday night.

Herman Edwards has been getting ripped for not being more aggressive with play-calling in trying to get Brien closer for his second attempt. The sequence was, indeed, too conservative and the Jets should never have wasted a yard with Chad Pennington taking a kneel down.

That said, however, it should be noted Brien entered the game having been successful on 11 of 12 FGs from 40-to-49 yards this season, a 91.6-percent success rate.

Regardless of the shocking misses, the support for Brien was universal inside the Jets’ locker room, where teammates, even in the heat of bitter defeat, stood by Brien in his defense.

“I’ll go to war with him again,” NT Jason Ferguson said. “I’m not going to turn my back on him. I thought he had both of them. Sometimes they bounce like that. But that’s my teammate. I’m not down on our kicker. That’s one of our soldiers. Whatever he does, we’ve got his back. And if someone doesn’t, you’re not a part of the team.”

Curtis Martin consoled Brien after the game and told him to keep his head up, adding, “This isn’t the end of the world.”

“It’s very easy to heap a whole lot of blame on (Brien), but it’s really unfair,” RG Pete Kendall said. “I know no one feels worse than Doug. I hope that the guys in the locker room recognize that it is a team game. We had other opportunities to win the game and it would be very unfair to say it’s all his fault.”

Chad Pennington called being a kicker in the NFL “probably one of the hardest jobs there is.”

“It takes special people, and Doug is a special person, a special player,” Pennington said. “He’s been Mr. Consistency for us since he’s gotten here. The ball just didn’t go through the uprights for him.”

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RB LaMont Jordan was rather frank when assessing the team the Jets lost to Saturday, saying this of the 16-1 Steelers: “We could have and should have beaten that team. There was nothing special about them. But when we were given game-winning opportunities we didn’t take advantage of those opportunities. Nobody expected us to win this game. Nobody expected it to be close. But we’re sad and upset that we didn’t win this game.

“This game is definitely a tough one to swallow. There is no going back and looking at the film and correcting our mistakes. Bottom line is we lost the game and our season is over.”