I was tempted to start this post out with a joke equating the Jets’ on field woes to the infamous French military prowess, but decided it wouldn’t be fair. After all, at least the Jets have an excuse to be in a surrendering mood: they’re running out of bodies to send out into the field. Consider this: I’m fairly sure that the Jets have gone through five quarterbacks so far this season. They went through three of them yesterday.

The Jets are the ultimate bad luck team. The injuries have made this a sort of lost season for them, but, sadly, they can’t just call off the rest of the games. They actually have to show up every week and go through the motions of losing. That has to be awfully damned demoralizing.

I don’t mean this as a knock against the team. I’ve always liked Herm and the Jets and I thought at the beginning of the year that they had a chance at a playoff spot. But when you have the quarterback problems that they’ve had combined with numerous, and serious, injuries to the rest of the team, it’s hard to find a way to win. A road win against a surging Broncos team would have soothed their seriously bruised dignity.

Didn’t happen.

The Broncos took the game 27-0 even though the offense seemed to go to sleep somewhere in the second quarter and only roused themselves late in the third--a typical Broncos mid-game slumber that usually allows opposing teams the sense that they are somehow getting back into the game. The Jets, though, couldn’t even get the ball past the Broncos’ twenty yard line and only ran ten offensive plays on the Broncos side of the field during the entire game. Five turnovers (compared to just one for the Broncos) and four sacks made it tough for the Jets to find a rhythm--and so did the mid-game change from Brooks Bollinger who left the game with a head injury, to Testaverde, who threw multiple interceptions, fumbled the ball, and then left the game late with an ankle injury.

The Jets only managed a paltry 22 yards of running yards and 173 yards passing while the Broncos piled up 196 yards rushing and 208 yards in the air.

Ouch.

What does it mean that when the Broncos, playing at home, beat a vastly inferior team? Not much in the sense that they should have won this game. On the other hand, championship teams win the games that they’re supposed to win and pick up a few surprises along the way. The Broncos are right where I expected them to be at eight wins. Only I expected them to take the entire season to get there and they made it with six games to go.

They’ve won all six home games and split their road games and they’ve managed to maintain their lead over the rest of the AFC West--a tenacious group of football teams that, with the exception of the Raiders, refuses to fall back far enough to let the Broncos get a breather. It’s tough luck for the Broncos, then, that they are about to hit the toughest part of their schedule with four of the final six on the road and three of the final six against AFC West opponents.

It wasn’t a meaningless game in that the Broncos needed to win it in order to come a step closer to having a playoff game in Denver this year. But the Jets were never in this one and never really tested the Broncos.