This Week in Jets Hate

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This Week In Jets Haters

Kicked off on September 29, 2010 at 3:52 AM by Max V.V.

Filed under: The Life Fanatic | Foreverlink

Tags: Bill Parcells, Braylon Edwards, Dustin Keller, Mark Sanchez, Rex Ryan

Back in August, the ever spectacular Joe Caporoso of Turn on the Jets was wise enough to pen what remains one of my all-time favorite Jets posts, enumerating the various haters lurking about the media, and their silly grievances. For a lot of sports organizations, this would be old hat. Cowboys fans, for instance, can practically set their watches to their hate, having long ago realized that “America’s Team” is an ironic nickname, much like calling a 6’6″ guy “Tiny.” But for the Jets, so often the forgotten team even in their own city, to receive so much attention, let alone vitriol, is a new phenomenon. Caporoso attributes much of it to Rex Ryan, perhaps now one of the sport’s best villains, trailing, in my opinion, only Al Davis and Brett Favre, as well as our cock of the walk attitude. The Hard Knocks hype probably didn’t help, and even I felt the number of appearances by this team in national headlines way exceeded saturation point over the summer, long before Braylon’s boozing and Ines Sainz’s flawless backside pushed the overexposure even further. You can only hear “Super Bowl champs! Super Bowl champs!” from one historically unaccomplished team so many times before you kind of just want to shut them up already.

So, yes, I understand distaste for the Jets conceptually, at least the 2010 brand. But wanting to put us back in our lowly place isn’t hate per se. No, to find true hate, one must turn to men like those you see pasted above, or listed in Caporoso’s article, for these are the men who make up the elite Jets hate squad. Despite being grossly compensated sports media “professionals,” these men, each for their own petty little reasons, have opted to become around-the-clock Jets bashers, come wins, losses, DUIs or on-field Dougies. This post is not intended to repeat the original TotJ article, but instead provide an update on some of our most heinous offenders. Let’s pull up the rock and see what crawls beneath:

Dan LeBatard

I’ve always had a lot of respect for LeBatard, or “LeRetard/LeBastard,” as some of you have been calling him, simply because in his subversiveness and extreme homerism, he’s always kind of been a blogger before bloggers, successfully alternating between acts of legitimate journalism and idiot frat boy antics. In fact, he first built a name for himself in college, when while working for the University of Miami’s student newspaper, he published Lou Holtz’s phone number and encouraged Hurricanes fans to call him incessantly. Twenty years later, and LeBatard still represents that kind of weird mix between the smartest guy in the room, and the most immature jackass you’ve ever met. It’s a persona I’ve tried fairly hard to affect, and to some success, so I can’t be too harsh on him.

But you guys can, and have been. And it’s entirely deserved after LeBatard unleashed an epic tirade against the Jets following the Ravens game two weeks ago, all set to one of those scary a$$ apocalyptic Gregorian chants, his stool Stugotz moaning periodically in the background. LeBatard clearly delighted in our non-performance, and implied heavily that the Jets would not rebound. He singled out three players in particular, and two of them, Mark Sanchez and Dustin Keller, just played critical roles in the obliteration of the Fins this Sunday. So now, after nearly everything about his greatly disseminated rant has been proven wrong, at least in the short term, what does LeBatard do? How does he react?

About the same way a little kid would after getting caught picking his nose on the playground.

Even before the Fins game, having recognized the Jets may actually be for real by their dismantling of New England, LeBatard has been on a Twitter tear, constantly attacking Jets fans’ spelling abilities, referring to it as “Ape-ese” and claiming this sub-language to be representative of our “fandumb.” Now, I spend a lot of time with Jets fans on Twitter, and I can say with all certainty that whatever fans sent him “illiterate” tweets were not part of the main Jets crew. These guys…the ones I’ve conversed with daily since February, intelligently discussing football when there was no football to discuss, know damn well how to spell. LeBatard knows better than to presume a few screaming jackanapes online to be emblematic of a fanbase at large. He’s just falling back on ad hominems because he doesn’t have sh*t else left to work with. I would ask if that should harm his credibility in any way, but then the man has largely built a career of this crap. Well, this crap and race-baiting, so…yeah.

“i apologize to apes…..jets fans keep throwing misspelled feces…

four decades of losing/unearned arrogance teaches nothing…apes evolve”

Just smile, nod and point to the scoreboard, guys.

Tony Dungy

Tony doesn’t really belong here. It’s not so much that he’s a hater of the Jets specifically, more that he’s just a largely intolerable human being who happened to have recently lugged his traveling revival tent over to to our neck of the woods. Now, I’m all for religious tolerance, and I want to make it clear right now that I respect all forms of the Christian faith, from Methodism to Greek Orthodox to Catholicism and even those zany Mormons. But if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s smug God-fearers of all stripes seeking to impose their personal moral code on others, particularly when they step out of their way to do so while acting as though they were just, you know, being neighborly. In this way, St. Tony “No Cussing Club” Dungy is much like the elderly woman in line at the grocery store who just ever so casually interrupts you to ask if you can stop saying “damn” or “hell” or even “crap” because there theoretically might be children present, and, again speaking theoretically, the parents of those children might well be uptight holy rollers trying to get home in time to watch the Duggars or read Joel Osteen books.

Not only does Tony Dungy have no business intruding into our locker room and criticizing our coach for his (effective) methods, but he really has no business criticizing anyone in the NFL, considering he doesn’t even work here anymore. Seriously, what is Tony Dungy at this point? He doesn’t coach, he’s the worst TV analyst I’ve ever seen in my life (1,000 yard stare + frog voice = quick someone get Boomer in here anything is better than this) and yet he parades around preaching his self-proclaimed “Quiet Strength” lifestyle to anyone within earshot. Plenty of others have already pointed out the absurdity of pardoning a convicted dog torturer, but going on hard after a coach who swears a lot, as though every other coach in the league isn’t doing the exact same thing. Meanwhile, Dungy continues to appear on TV weekly with his magical proclamations about how he would conduct his business were he still actually a coach and not jus a televangelist strangely positioned next to Rodney Harrison. “If I were Reggie Bush…” he says. “If I were “Rex Ryan…”

Meanwhile, he has the nerve to 1) criticize Rex’s personality because, heaven forbid, he spoke like every coach in every football movie ever 2) actually implored the Commissioner’s Office to fine him as a result 3) offered no real apology 4) visited our team this weekend before racing off to give one of his Flandersy Learning Annex speeches for the Yankees and 5) proceeded to criticize our handling of Braylon Edwards again that very night. Screw off, Dungy, you sanctimonious turd.

Mike Florio

Haha, I just wanted an excuse to post this picture:

The throbbing pustule himself.

Florio actually placed us second on his power rankings for this week, so I guess he’s learned his lesson. Besides, I’ve always felt the man is less a Jets hater than he is a smarmy football misanthrope who just happens to hate us with a very specific passion. Seinfeld.

Mike Francesa

Oh boy, it’s the big baddie himself. Just the very mention of his name is often enough to set Jets fans over the edge, and I’m beginning to understand why. See, I never really listened to sports radio until I got my first car when I was 17. As unbearably long as his Baton Death March of a show is, the runtime usually overlapped with school and working at Stop & Shop, so I didn’t hear too much of him. Since then, I’ve largely lived out of the NY area, and thus have been safely removed from Francesa’s whiny radius, and happily so, even if I am still subjected daily to the intolerable Colin Cowherd. But I remember very clearly my dad coming home from work each night shrieking about “Fatcesa” and how full of crap he was and so on and so on.

Is he ever. Franny has spent the better part of the last year positively tearing into the Jets regardless of their on-field performance. We lose, he tells us we’re classless and we suck. We win, he tells us we’re classless and we suck. We win multiple playoff games, he still figures out a way to prove that we’re classless and we suck. We all know how central his love affair with Bill Parcells is to all of this, as well as his general hatred of Rex Ryan and his frustrations with the Jets organization’s avoidance of his program, but ultimately, I think the dude’s just a hater. Just a pure, unfiltered, God honest hater. He simply loves to see us lose, feasting on each failure like a vulture upon carrion (poetic enough?). And when something “classless” occurs off the field, like Braylon’s arrest? Forget it! It becomes yet another facet of the Cancer That Is Killing the Jets. All Franny wanted all week long was for us to bench Braylon. “BENCH HIM BENCH HIM BENCH HIM!!!” he cried. “It’s da riaght thing to doah!” Braylon wound up winning us the game. His response? Take a guess.

Of course, it was his pure, virginal and tastefully coached Giants who came across as unprepared and undisciplined this week in their loss to the Titans, and while he might criticize them individually, you know he’ll never admit we got the better of them. It seems to this blowhard we’ll simply always be the Classless Jets, standing in the shadow of his beloved Yankees…uh, I mean Giants.

[THE ILK]

[JiF]

Nice. Love it. Attack everyone of those jokers.

So Lebretard's only rebuttal is to insult Jets fans that cant spell?

What a douche. He's got to feel like a total idiot after that whole tirade.

[THE ILK]

[Scott Dierking]

Really, hating the Jets is akin to hating the Cubs. You shouldn't do it unless you are a White Sox fan or a goat.

What a lot of these guys are doing is glomming on a bandwagon of attention. If they can somehow hitch a ride, and even better hitch a ride of contrary, the more attention they can bring to themselves. And that is what is in it for them in the end.

[THE ILK]

Really, hating the Jets is akin to hating the Cubs. You shouldn't do it unless you are a White Sox fan or a goat.

What a lot of these guys are doing is glomming on a bandwagon of attention. If they can somehow hitch a ride, and even better hitch a ride of contrary, the more attention they can bring to themselves. And that is what is in it for them in the end.

Common fleas!

[HessStation]

Tbh that was probably one of the best posts I've ever read.Very entertaining and well said!

[newjakecity]

It's nice to see the haters called out, but I disagree with this statement:

But for the Jets, so often the forgotten team even in their own city, to receive so much attention, let alone vitriol, is a new phenomenon.

Maybe receiving attention is a new phenomenon and maybe the hate has become more vocal, but in the twenty years since I've followed football closely (and growing up in a Jets family 11 years before that), I can tell you that the Jets hate has always been there. It didn't matter if the coach was Rex Ryan, Herman Edwards, Bill Parcells, or whoever (just so people can stop using the Rex Ryan talks too much excuse). Maybe its because certain parts of the national media hated New York and certain parts of the local media hated the team that wasn't the beloved, precious, "classy" Giants. Or maybe it is pure scapegoating. The hate has always been there.

The difference is that instead of the hate being in the form of laughter and disdain, the hate is now in the forms of a "who do they think they are" attitude.

[flgreen]

What? No Cimini?

[Bruce Banner]

This just hit me, Tony Dungy is the white Jimmy Carter.