Part of being a true fan of a team involves a stubborn refusal to understand that the other team has fans of its own who care about their team as much as you care about yours. Impossible! The other team is nothing more than Opponent. When you are watching on Sunday afternoon, all you want to know is: How do we kill these guys? Whom do we boo? Die, humans wearing different colors than the colors for which I have grown accustomed to cheering!
We are here to help. With a slight nod to Drew Magary’s Why Your Team Sucks series, we want to give you three people to scream at on the television every Sunday, peppering Cheetos flecks in every direction. The Jets play the Tennessee Titans at Giants Stadium at 1 p.m. on Sunday. Here’s whom to boo on the Titans.
Kerry Collins. It’s kind of crazy to think that of the four men to lead the New York Giants to the Super Bowl, Kerry Collins is one of them. The Giants were the team that helped transition Collins from talented drunk to grizzled game manager. (It’s so strange to think that Collins, who once drunkenly called a teammate a racial epithet because he thought it would be a way for everyone to bond, is now a steady foundation around which chaos swirls.) Anyway, the Titans desperately need a win this week … and this is exactly the type of situation in which Collins has historically struggled. If you are asking your quarterback to win a game for you — and the Titans’ defensive struggles this year have required them to do that — and that quarterback is Kerry Collins, dogged craftsmanship aside, then you’re in trouble.
Jevon Kearse. The defensive lineman has been known as “The Freak” throughout his career, for his physical prowess, and considering your average football player is casually capable of feats normal humans shouldn’t be allowed even to attempt, it is no small compliment that Kearse has been singled out. But he’s 33 years old now, which in football terms makes him approximately 482 years of age. He also is all philosophical about this year’s wretched start: “Maybe we’re just getting our losses out of the way right now.” That’s an intriguing theory. We’re going to apply it to our everyday life: “Those four pedestrians we accidentally knocked onto the subway tracks this morning … we’re just getting them out of the way right now. The afternoon should be free and clear.”
Kevin Mawae. It will never feel right seeing him in a uniform other than a Jets one, even though it has been three years since he played here. Mawae is an intelligent, utterly likable human being who’s the head of the player’s union, a devout Christian, and still an effective center at the age of 38. There is no possible way Kevin Mawae could be considered a bad person or worthy of spite. Damn. The Titans are kind of likable. But 0–2, reeling, and in the Jets’ path. Throats on larynges, please. Oh, you didn’t know larynges was the plural of larynx? Well, it is.