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The usual NFL workweek — an intense, 80- to 90-hour grind from Sunday to Sunday — usually has a few hours here and there for down time.
For the players, Monday is relatively slow, usually given over to resting aches and pains and watching film. Tuesday is the traditional off day, a mental health day meant to be spent with friends and family away from the facility. The real work for the players starts on Wednesday, and the game plan is fine-tuned Thursday and Friday. Everything builds to a climax Sunday afternoon. Then, the cycle starts all over again.
Not this week. They’ll be no easing into tonight’s Patriots-Jets game at Gillette. Instead, it’s been a white-knuckle ride of meetings, practices, film study and rehab from Sunday afternoon at roughly 4:15 — when the Patriots-Bills game ended — to tonight at 8:15. It’ll mark the first time New England will have such a quick turnaround since 2002, when it beat the Lions in Detroit on Thanksgiving Day.
The shortened prep time means you have to make sure you have your priorities in order, according to Patriots coach Bill Belichick, who called a week like this “a cram course.”
“There are some things that on a week like this you sit down and say, ‘That is a good idea, that would be a good thing to do, but I don’t think we can get it done this week so save that for another day,’” Belichick said. “And there are some of those that you put in and say, ‘Well, I think we really need this, I wish we had a little more time to work on it, but we are going to try to get it ready in the amount of time that we have.’”
“Your week is cut straight in half. Normally, the days you’re off resting your body and everything like that, you’re in here studying film, getting going on the personnel, on the game film,” said quarterback Matt Cassel. “The time allotment that you have to really study these guys and get ready for them is cut in half.”
“We knew this was coming before this regular season even started. We just have to prepare for it the best way possible — hot tub, cold tub, stretching and all that good stuff,” said defensive lineman Ty Warren. “We know what it is, and I’m sure it is the same thing on their end.”
The challenge is even greater, considering the stakes — both teams come into tonight’s game at 6-3, tied for first place in the AFC East. A win would allow the Patriots or Jets to start pondering a possible “hat and T-shirt game.” That’s Tedy Bruschi’s way of talking about a clincher: a contest where the winner goes back to the locker room and is handed a new hat and T-shirt that usually reads “Division Champions.”
“We see it as crunch time,” Bruschi said. “It’s the meat of our schedule, because the first goal you have going into a season is you want to win your division. I think that’s what all of us in the AFC East want to do, and we’re sort of log jammed right now.
“I think the team that dukes it out the best and is standing at the end is going to be the team that puts on those hats and T-shirts.”
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