Jets Players Discuss Bye Week, Buffalo Bills

On Sunday the New York Jets travel up to western New York to take on the  Buffalo Bills in a huge AFC match-up.  On Wednesday several Jets players shared their thoughts on the upcoming game against the Bills, their ability to play better coming off of a bye week, as well as on the difficulty of the next 2 games which also includes the Patriots.

Santonio Holmes

On coming off the bye week…

“I think it’s putting in as much effort as we put in the game before going into the bye week. We pretty much have to come out with that same effort and intensity and give it to these guys come Sunday. We know what is at stake right now. Going up there with another AFC game and a divisional game as well, and we have to make the best of it.”

On how tough the next two game stretch will be…

“I think this is the best part of football. Once you get that bye week out of the way, everything pretty much lies in front of you, knowing that you control your own destiny. And I think that’s where we are right now.”

Dustin Keller

On the possibility of making big plays against Buffalo’s aggressive defense…

“Without question, and they’ve been getting a lot of turnovers because of those gambles they’ve been making. But, you also could give up a huge play. So when the opportunity comes we’re going to make sure it’s a big play and not a turnover.”

On getting a read on what Buffalo’s secondary does…

“I think they switch it up, they switch it up fairly often, so it’s kind of hard to get a read on them, and so far this season it seems we’ll look at how teams have been playing other teams and try to get a feel for that, and then we go into it and it seems like more times than not we’re seeing something completely different. So you obviously have to study all the gameplans and stuff that they’ve done in the past, but you have to be ready to make a change at any second for a different defense that you haven’t seen all year. And I think these last few games, that’s something we’ve been good at.”

Bart Scott

On the significance of the next two games…

“Of course, we control our own destiny. The two teams that are ahead of us, we play them, and if we’re successful, we’ll be on top. That’s the challenge. Going out and playing two divisional opponents and trying to take control of this division. After everything that has happened and things that have been written and said about us, if we win these next two weeks, we’re right exactly where we want to be.”

On the difference between the Bills offense this year and last year…

“Absolutely no difference, all they’re doing is executing doing what they did and what they’ve always done, they’re just doing it better. They’ve been together, they’ve been able to get some chemistry with each other. Their line is playing up to each other and working well together and they’re just executing well. It’s the same exact plays that they’ve had ever since I’ve been here. They spread you out to run, more of a spread-type of offense. I think now they’re just executing better and they’re not hurting themselves by getting penalties and turning the ball over.”

On if the team has lost their swagger…

“We’ve faced adversity, Mark (Sanchez’s) rookie year, we experienced two three-game losing streaks. We still believed in each other, we still believed in the coaching staff, and we know we can dig ourselves out of any hole. We don’t want to be in those holes, but we still believe that it’s not over until it’s over. We’ll just keep playing and see what happens. I think we’re finally figuring out how we want to go about winning and how we want to go about playing. And I think even some of those games, like that Patriots game, we may have lost, but that was the first time I believed where we played the way that we wanted to play and dictate our style and our pace on other people. But to say that we had a bit of an identity crisis at the beginning of the year, I think a lot of teams were trying to figure out how they were going to go about the season.”

As expected the player’s are saying all of the right things as the challenge in front of the team is pretty obvious.  If Gang Green can take care of business against the Bills and Patriots, they can make a legitimate run at a division title.

Tyson Rauch

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