Beltway Tribes

JETS @ LIONS

 It’s week nine. I’m at 51^st State Tavern in Foggy Bottom, a self-proclaimed ‘New York’ bar that hosts both the Giants and the Jets games.  Jets get the prime real estate on the ground floor, unless the game times are staggered as they were this week. Then the Giants fans simply replace the Jets fans  in the downstairs space, or vice versa.

We’re at the halfway point in the season, and just as teams know what they can and can’t do now, I know my limitations, too.  Before I get to the bars on Sundays, I consult Google Maps or WMATA for road or train directions.  At the beginning of the season, if my estimated trip time was 25 minutes, I gave myself 25 minutes. By midseason I know that I’m not a turn-by-turn guy. My mind is goofy.  I miss exits. I can’t resist the occasional ad-libbed short cut that almost certainly tacks an unnecessary fifteen minutes onto my commute. I get too ambitious with my parking search, passing on the safe spot that’s two blocks away from the bar in favor of the imaginary one right out front, then double back for the safe spot only to find that it’s been taken. Now anything inside a half mile radius will have to do; kick off's in two minutes.

And then, once I actually made it into the bar, my inclination would be to order the most interesting beer on tap – a porter or an IPA or some such. The more micro the brew, the mo' better. Turns out hoppy beers early in the afternoon give me a headache. These are the things you learn about yourself early on in the schedule.

 I might have also ordered some kind of burger, forgetting what I, as a food service veteran, have known my entire adult life: only the most apprentice grill cooks get assigned to the weekend day shifts.  With the exception of those much-lauded crab cake sandwiches from the Baltimore game, it was one rat ass burger after another those first four weeks. 

When after the overlong commute, the migraine and the low grade meat I got down to the business of watching the game, I figured that I didn’t have to write shit down. I'm a relatively young man with a taste for mental rigor - no problem, right? Wrong. By the time I got back to the apartment and napped off the beer and bad food, all I was left with were faint memories of the Pulitzer insights I was generating just a few hours earlier.e

 

But guess what. It’s mid-season, now. And my game is tight. Peep me in this photo. Notepad. MEDIUM BODIED beer (I go Amber at the darkest). Order of French Fries that, while absolutely terrible, only cost me $3.00. I should have time-stamped this pic so you could see it’s only the first quarter, and there I am – sitting at a GOOD table. I’m clicking on all cylinders, sensitivity to my own weaknesses. I want this W, so I prepared to get it. 

 I’m like the Jets in that regard. Forgive that bush league transition and hear me out for a second. The Jets thought they were invincible coming into the season, or at least made a real effort to project that they were. Nobody talked more ying-yang in the offseason than these guys. It struck me a little strange that a team that went 9-7 last year, and felt so insecure in their ground game (a supposed strength) that they brought in a washed up RB in LeDanian Tomlinson to shore it up, was flapping their gums.  But hey. The NFL is a talker's league. In fact that's one the best things about it.

After seven games, the Jets are 5-2. That’s solid, especially with the state of parity in the League this year. They’ve picked up quality wins against the Patriots, Vikings and Dolphins and dropped a close one against the Ravens.  Their lone  IPA-migraine was clearly last week’s game at home against the Packers: a 9-0 shut-out loss and a confirmation of what Jets fans already knew – second-year QB Mark Sanchez (16-38 passing, 0 TDs, 2 INTs) is at his best when you’re asking him to manage the game, not win it for you. 

Yes, that is a 2008 Favre Jets Jersey. I'm baffled.

Enter the Detroit Lions, this week’s opponent. A couple of posts ago I said that teams want to play the New England Patriots because the team itself is not as good as the organization’s brand. The opposite is true of the Lions. Detroit, to use a sports cliché, is dangerous (‘dangerous’ being what you call teams that you don’t want to commit to calling ‘good’). But because they still have the stink of that 0-16 season, nobody’s throwing a parade if you beat them. In fact you should probably take a Red-Eye back into town under an assumed name if you don't.

Hence the Jets fans state of distress when this game turns out to be close. 

I have to hand it to them.  I haven’t been around a more intense fan base this season. Everyone that dared claim a stool at the bar is wearing Green and White. They curse at the screen, and will not suffer judgment from any quarter over it. A family of four sitting at a corner table rolls their eyes and mutters something about the yelling being too loud, and draws death glares from no fewer than five guys, including ole' #4 pictured above. There was no more of that out of them.

 Things get ugly for the Jets quickly.When Lions Cornerback Alphonso Smith intercepts a Sanchez pass in the third quarter, I get ready to flip the script on this entire blog to accommodate a 4,000 word post on the Branch Davidian scene that looked like it would go down (did I mention these guys are intense?). Or at the very least, I would have landed an interview with the family of the one Detroit fan who inexplicably decided to show up at the bar, and was torn asunder after loud-clapping the yet another Lions touchdown. 

[As an aside, I don’t know why people do that -- go to the opponent’s bar wearing their team’s colors. I applaud the Jets fans for tolerating him with good humor, but there was a point when I just wish they'd bum rush the guy already.]

All is well in the end, however. The Jets win on an a dramatic overtime FG, raising their record to an AFC-leading 6-2 and a tie in the division with the Pats. If I ultimately decide to join these guys to ride out the season, I'll need to elevate my game yet again. Arrive earlier to grab a stool. Get my New York swagger going. Or at the very least hydrate at home so I can try the house heffeweissen, which I'm told is off the chain. 

K.C.