The Jets: Defiant Mike

Since our team’s glorious victory last week, we Jets fans have been smugly eager to hear what WFAN’s Mike Francesa was going to say about it all. The desire to hear Mike eat crow came up about as often as actual crowing did on the Jets blogs and boards after the game. Mike made his reputation as a big-time Jets-basher earlier this year when he insisted, after a well intentioned, schoolboy attempt by Mark Sanchez to read his post-loss remarks rather than improvise them, that Sanchez shouldn’t “make speeches” in the locker room until he could tell “the color of his team’s jerseys from the other team’s” and then later that the Jets had backed into the playoffs when Indianapolis pulled its starters in the third quarter in that December game, making “a certain loss” for the boys in green into a win. (The pull, though not the call, did seem odd; it made sense to rest the Colts starters, but didn’t seem to make sense to risk them for three quarters and then rest them.)

Monday was a day off for hockey, so we first got to hear Mike Tuesday, and it was disappointing. Mike was not majestically mad Mike but meta-Mike, talking not about why he doubts the Jets but about why the Jets fans hate Mike. The callers allowed on tended to share his bemused mystification at why, exactly, he is being attacked by Jets fans—instant amnesia being one of Mike’s foibles—thus leaving Mike to spend more time meditating on what had caused him to be taken to be a Jets basher than he did on bashing or, for that matter, boosting the Jets. At around three o’clock he proudly announced, in a defiant tone that the President might want to emulate at this juncture, that having been wrong before was no reason to back down now.

“Here’s what they want me to do,” he said—to Joe from Syosset, I think, though it might have been Kevin in Newtown. “They want me to say, ‘They’ve got a great defense! They’ve got a great chance!’ No. You’re not going to hear me say that. Not a chance! Not. A. Chance.” What was interesting was that Mike didn’t seem to be arguing with the claim that the Jets might actually have a great defense and a decent chance, but with those who would impose their will on him to make him say it. It was defiance for defiance’s sake. As I said, something for the President to think about.