MOSTLY WELL-DESERVED

Seven Jets made it to the Pro Bowl. For a game no one cares about, that's pretty significant and worth mentioning.

It's also pretty heady stuff - most teams that get 5 or more players to the Pro Bowl are championship-caliber teams. The strange thing about it is that the Jets are precariously perched when it comes to playoff position. For the most part, though, the nods were well-deserved.
Let's look at the selections:

QB - Brett Favre - The Pro Bowl shouldn't be a legacy award, but we all know this happens sometimes. Favre is the least deserving of the Jets named, and might be so banged up that he gives up his spot. Maybe then someone more deserving like Matt Cassel or Chad Pennington will get in. It's not like this is unprecedented....but that doesn't make it right.

RB - Thomas Jones - What a year he's had. Jets records for touchdowns (rushing and overall). He hasn't looked like one of the best in the game at times this year, but with the Jets' struggles in the passing game for most of this year, he's probably the team MVP (at least offensively).

OL - Alan Faneca, Nick Mangold - Another significant piece of the Jets' success this year, especially the veteran Faneca, who is probably directly responsible for the younger Mangold getting to the Pro Bowl. Well-deserved on both counts.

DT - Kris Jenkins - OK. At times he has been dominant this year, but others he's been near-invisible. I'd say this is probably deserved...but only mostly, not 100%.

CB - Darrelle Revis - Definitely deserved. Might make an argument here for Kerry Rhodes as well. They've been the strength of the Jets' secondary. Good for Revis. He was a good draft pick.

KR - Leon Washington - For the first time since Chad Morton's heyday, the Jets have a legit threat on kickoffs. Washington has become a threat to score every time he touches the ball...moreso on special teams than offense, but you still can't relax when he's in the backfield because he might break one.

So all of this is to say that it may look weird for the Jets to have 7 Pro Bowlers, but 5 of them definitely deserve the nod. The other 2 sort of raise expectations for themselves over the final two games of the season.

Because here's the other thing - there's only one Bowl I care about come February. And it isn't the one in Hawaii.

AN UPDATE ON THE JETS

You may or may not have noticed that I don't spend a whole lot of time writing about the NFL off-season. There are a couple of reasons for this:

1) It happens to fall during the time that I really get excited about baseball season, and

2) I don't understand it as much.

I like football...a lot. But I don't pretend to understand schemes, and gameplans, and how this player fits into this or who would work best in what. I understand that Jonathan Vilma had gotten into Eric Mangini's doghouse in some way, and wasn't the perfect fit with the Jets anymore, and had to be moved, but that's about it. So there's nothing I can comment on that is worth commenting on.

That said, my cousin lives and breathes football year 'round, and he's been reading the blog, and is upset that I haven't touched on the Jets since, oh, about October. And after yesterday's post about the NBA, he's threatened my life. So I think I'll touch on the Jets' moves today.

I'm confused, thrilled, and upset about the three big moves the Jets have made so far this off-season. Not in that order - I'll go over them in the order they happened.

On Friday, the Jets traded Jonathan Vilma to the Saints for a fourth-round draft pick. OK, fine...but then they acquired Kris Jenkins from Carolina for third and fifth-round draft picks. What gives there? I agree with my cousin - it seems like the Jets should have been able to get more for Vilma, especially considering what they gave up for Jenkins.

And here's what bothers me about Jenkins. By all accounts, he hasn't been effective in a few years. And he's been injured recently. The following is not speculation - this is fact...and it's kind of been brushed under the rug for some reason. But almost everyone associated with the Carolina Panthers' Super Bowl team was involved in some way with a huge steroids ring, weren't they? Please correct me if I'm wrong about this - but even if fans aren't sure about that situation, I'm sure teams in the NFL are. So why would the Jets acquire a guy who is so closely connected to a scandal like that....not to mention a guy whose numbers are mysteriously up and down in relation to that incident.

So there's the bad news - it seems like the Jets didn't get equal value for Vilma, and I don't know that it was a smart move getting Jenkins. But their most recent move should be well worth the money invested.

The Jets signed free agent guard Alan Faneca to a record-setting 5-year, $40 million deal. This should improve their offensive line immensely - the young guys will benefit from a veteran presence - and not just any veteran presence, but possibly the best in the league at what he does. The running game should also benefit, and the quarterbacks will actually have some time to make something happen. This one signing could be the difference between two years' ago's playoff appearance and last year's disaster.

BENCH FOR CHURCH ON SUNDAY: Not the pew kind. Ryan Church was sidelined for a few days after a collision with Marlon Anderson on Saturday left Church with a concussion. All of the written accounts of the injury say it was a nasty collision - but I haven't found any video of it. I'm not sure there is any. We'll see if anything turns up by Friday, when the Mets are on ESPN. If it ever turns up, that might be the time. Hopefully this doesn't linger for very long. Promising news - in his first at-bat against a lefty, on Friday (or at least the first one I saw, when I was watching the tape-delay of the Friday game), Church singled to right. So that was encouraging. We'll see what happens the rest of the spring, but he needs to play.