Things had been pretty quiet on the Patriots-Jets front for the first few days of this week, but things picked up steam on Thursday.
The Patriots went full troll on their Twitter account Thursday by posting a picture of Mark Sanchez’s Buttfumble from the 2012 season, which someone in the organization must have realized wasn’t quite keeping with Bill Belichick’s preferred way to approach games because it was taken down a short time later.
Jets defensive tackle Sheldon Richardson added some meat to the stew later on Thursday when asked if a win would validate the Jets’ rebuilding process.
“This is going to be another win for us. We’ll let you all write the columns about validating wins and stuff like that. This is going to be another win in the win column if we go out there and execute and do what we’re supposed to do,” Richardson said, via Kristian Dyer of Metro New York. “We’re going to be up in the division, that’s how we’re going to look at it. We’re going to be the front-runners, that’s how we look at it.”
Anything that dances into the area of a guaranteed win draws a strong reaction and Richardson’s will likely do the same even if the context of “validating wins” makes the answer read a bit differently than it would if Richardson was simply saying the Jets are going to win.
At any rate, Richardson’s feeling that the Patriots’ offensive line injuries don’t shift the needle in the Jets’ direction because the Patriots “always find a way when they’re not stacked up well to find a way to win anyway” suggests that Richardson knows the Jets probably won’t win just by showing up for Sunday’s only matchup between teams with winning records.