National Football League

Eagles, Jets, Jaguars caught looking ahead

Published Oct. 24, 2009 5:02 a.m. ET

foxsports

Talk about your wake-up calls, the Eagles and Jets got slammed upside their heads by the alarm clocks last weekend. The Jaguars ducked just in time. Philadelphia's players must have been entranced by the beauty of the Bay Area before stinking it up in Oakland, losing to a Raiders team that looked so pitiful the previous week that Giants linebacker Antonio Pierce equated his club's romp to a scrimmage. Instead of laying it on an outmanned opponent in a state of turmoil, the Eagles laid an enormous egg. Why? Sure seems like they were looking ahead. "It's a great lesson to learn that no team is as good as you think in this league and no team is as bad as you think in this league," Eagles coach Andy Reid said. "It's the National Football League and you better be ready every week to play and execute as coaches and players, and it starts with me. Anything less than that, you've got a problem." The Jets had a huge problem on the same day. Even worse, they played at home against division rival Buffalo and had a 13-3 halftime lead. Then, they couldn't do anything right in the second half and overtime, rookie Mark Sanchez threw five interceptions and, suddenly, they were looking at a three-game slide. "It's shocking," defensive end Shaun Ellis said. "It was a tough loss. I thought we were ready to play. We proved it at times, but it just wasn't a consistent effort throughout the whole game and it came to bite us in the end. We had a lot of mistakes." Jacksonville was more fortunate, maybe because the opposition was the Rams, who now are 0-6 and have been outscored 169-54. Not that the Jags can take anyone lightly; their overtime victory lifted them to 3-3. And if they'd lost the OT coin toss, maybe the Rams would have gotten their first win. Jaguars coach Jack Del Rio chose to look at the bright side - yep, he found one - and not carry negative vibes into the team's bye week. "The fact that we didn't blink, we kept fighting, was real positive," he said. "We hung in there and we were able to win that game." The point is they shouldn't be just hanging in against clearly inferior opposition. We hear about how this happens all the time in college football when traditional rivals are a week away from meeting. The message is always, "Don't look ahead." Hey, the pro guys should be heeding such advice. Yet, it happens pretty often in the NFL, too, where favorites take an opponent lightly and get burned. "I have sensed it and been a part of it," said Rich Gannon, the league MVP in 2002 with the Raiders and now a host on Sirius-XM NFL Radio. "What normally happens, whether subconsciously or consciously, you start thinking about yourself and feeling good about how good you've played. You believe those press clippings. So what tends to happen is the week of preparation is impacted. Players have missed assignments and that translates into poor starts, guys get beat. "When you sense it is during the course of the week, a guy shows up late for meetings or a morning workout, or a young player has three of four mental errors in practice. There's a sloppy Wednesday practice, coaches getting upset that the intensity is not where it needs to be. That is never a good thing." Every week this season will carry the potential for such humiliating flops. So many teams - St. Louis, Detroit, Tampa Bay, Washington, Kansas City, Oakland, Cleveland, Tennessee and Buffalo - have myriad problems. When some of the more solid or even dominant clubs match up with the dregs of the league, the potential for routs is high. So is the potential for looking ahead, as best evidenced by Donovan McNabb calling a timeout late in the first half when the Eagles had none left. "I've been on teams where you can see the storm brewing," Gannon said. "That is clearly what separates the good teams from the dominant teams, the teams that are poor and the teams that are average. "Look at the Colts, a veteran team, and I guess you will not see that. They have very high expectations and great leadership. (Coach) Jim Caldwell's whole theme this week, coming off a bye and playing the Rams, he went back over the history of the last three to four years of teams starting with undefeated or winning records and what happened to them in these (situations). He brought up the Ravens and Jets, who now all of a sudden are 3-3 with three straight losses." If the Jets learned their lesson, they get a quick chance to prove it against the Raiders on Sunday. New York rarely plays well on the West Coast, losing all four games last year to mediocre teams (Seattle, San Diego, San Francisco and Oakland, none of which finished with a winning record). But the fiasco against the Bills sure has their attention. Or so they claim. "It's definitely a crossroads and ... we'll find out what kind of team we are," linebacker Bart Scott said. "I believe in the character in this room and I believe in the coaching staff. Nobody is jumping off the ship, at least not in this locker room. We have to continue to get better and make sure that each guy does what he can do better to take it to the next level." In other words, PAY ATTENTION! ---