At this moment, there is a man in Mount Laurel, New Jersey who can’t remember what sunlight looks like. His eyes have become addled and opaque behind the flicker of his glasses. Should he turn to look away from his computer screen, he will see only the bluish afterimage of the practice field, now permanently burned into his vision. This man’s job is to scavenge through hundreds of hours of raw Jets training camp footage and assemble the most captivating moments into a one hour TV special. Consider the weight of that challenge. From every stretch to every shower, from drill to scrimmage, he and his 14 co-workers must pick apart over a week of big hits and even bigger talk, leaving untold amount of otherwise fascinating material abandoned in the cutting room. Perhaps the greatest drawback to Hard Knocks is not the the effect it could have on team focus and chemistry, but that it can only show us so much. I know many a Jets fan who would not object to settling in on the couch and watching the entire roll of film if they could. But, for now, we only get one hour.

Hard Knocks is here, and I am freaking pumped.

When I was invited to write a guest Kvetch, I was pumped. One, I just like the site. I am first and foremost a football fan, and I get an inordinate amount of joy from my interactions with other football fans (he conceded, conveniently bypassing the psychoanalysis that might otherwise be warranted), and Jets fans are high on my list for their undying passion. But two, your New York Jets are constructed after my own pigskin-wrapped heart. They were built in a manner that conforms to the way I would build a team, were anyone simply wise enough to hire me to do so. And as a lifelong Browns fan, if I wanted to go the easy route, I could boil my 2010 Jets analysis down to one very precise word:

Jealousy.

It might be a deadly sin, but I watched with envy for years as New York’s brain trust loaded up on high-grade, trench-dwelling monsters like Nick n’ Brick, and making savvy trades for key components like the Sanchize (the pick for whom you scored from my Browns and your former coach, The Manguin, in return for relatively little). Of course, it hasn’t yet resulted in the kinds of winning you’re looking for, but I have long believed the Jets were on the right track. Now I am sure of it.

This may come off as disingenuous considering I link to them far more routinely than to any other non-team specific site, but I think Pro Football Talk kind of really sucks. While they do have a knack for getting stories fired off quickly, that talent mostly comes as a result of monitoring Adam Schefter and Jay Glazer’s Twitter accounts and typing like a stenographer on amphetamines, as fittingly illustrated by KSK. Although I am a neutral political actor in this, I do support, in spirit, The Jets Blog’s “embargo” against Florio and his stupid, stupid haircut. It’s about time someone took a stand for something, dammit! However, I must give credit where it is due, and this summer, when it comes to the Jets contract situation, it is due to PFT. They have been in many instances substantially more on the ball than our own local media, and were the first to reveal the true details of D’Brickashaw’s new extension (although they’ve been overly harsh in assuming this is a raw deal for Brick). It is thus with a slightly less raised eyebrow that I present their newest article pertaining to Darrelle Revis, which presents the doomiest of doomday scenarios. Assuming that no new deal can be worked out, and that Revis opts out of the final years of his rookie contract, which he would, the league could declare the Jets’ buyout of those years in violation of the 30 Percent Rule, forcing Revis into an unrestricted free agency period that would deny the Jets even the use of tenders and the franchise tag. Okay, I take it back: my eyebrow is raised again. This is simply not going to happen. However, the threat of its very possibility gives Revis a new bargaining chip, perhaps his only real source of leverage beyond his own talent at this point, and proves how essential it is that we take care of business. In debating the “will-he-won’t-he” holdout situation, Florio cements his reactionary ways by again noting that Revis’s uncle, the Pro Bowl defensive tackle Sean Gilbert, once (foolishly) sat out an entire season. Oh, and that Revis considers Gilbert to be a mentor of sorts. Which proves we’re screwed, I guess. So, in short, I take it all back: Mike Florio is a moron. Embargo away.

If you’re like the majority of Jets fans, Wednesday’s news that left tackle D’Brickashaw Ferguson had agreed to a contract extension was for you a supremely welcomed relief. After weeks of fretting that the team would deflate under the pressure of a post-championship style financial situation without even first securing the requisite hardware, we can now say without any hesitation that our first pick in the 2006 Draft will be a Jet for as long as he remains a healthy, productive player. Of course, given the information that has seeped out since the announcement, “healthy” and “productive” might be the operative words. According to Pro Football Talk, the six-year, $60 million deal that claims to grant Brick $34.8 million in guaranteed money – the most in the league at his position – actually contains so many caveats and asterisks that it in essence assures him of no more than $2.2 million in addition to his current salary. The team will dole out his new money incrementally based on a series of complicated and Byzantine criterion, most of which boil down to, “Are you still playing?” If the answer is yes, Brick collects most of his money, excepting perhaps for that laughable $1.3 million earned by blocking seven punts. Bent over at The Jets Blog breaks this whole matter down as cleanly as one can, if you’d like to have the numbers laid out for you.

Tannenbaum has always had a reputation for being a math whiz, and a contract such as this, which manages to make the player happy while protecting the Jets from financial disaster, is vintage salary capology. There was a lot of talk earlier in the week of the “Leon Factor,” which proposed that the motivating condition of the Core Four’s demands was a substantial amount of guaranteed money, engineered to protect against a season or career ending injury. In Brick’s case, the “Leon Factor” would seem to have taken a backseat to the Team Factor. Brick and his agent obviously knew what they were signing, and they have sent the message that they are willing to sacrifice upfront money to help lighten the stress of Woody’s wallet. In this sense, fans floating the notion that the Jets have “rewarded” Brick for not complaining about his contract is actually true, if only because his deal was designed to open a window for Revis and the rest.

If Douglas Adams were A) still alive and B) a Jets fan, he might have this to say to us all: DON’T PANIC.

Of the many negative narratives that have engulfed the Jets this offseason, there is none sillier than the idea that this is a team that “does not take care of its own.” The operating assumption of these foolish meme is that team management has become so fixated on tacking on flashy, expensive cast-offs from other teams (think Santonio Holmes, Braylon Edwards), that they’ve come to neglect home grown talent raised up through the team system Superficially, this argument appears to make sense. After all, Darrelle Revis, David Harris, Nick Mangold, D’Brickashaw Ferguson and Shaun Ellis all came up through the Draft, and are now fighting for restructured contracts and extensions. Meanwhile, the team coldly and callously dealt injured Jets product Leon Washington to Seattle, and handed out pink slips to beloved leaders Thomas Jones and Alan Faneca (who, while not Jets by birth, if you will, had become core members of the team).

This trend – ship out Jones, bring in LT; say goodbye Kerry Rhodes, hello Cromartie – looks really bad. Factor in the ridiculous claim that we are the “paper champions” or “Madden champions” of the league (as though we’ve yet had a chance to prove otherwise), and you get a news story. But does it hold up? Well, if you were to believe absolutely pundit in the world, prior to the mechanization of the current regime, the Jets were soft. We had a long history of losing, a dearth of star players and did not make the moves needed to correct this. A few years ago, Tannenbaum shredded our roster and brought in guys like Faneca, Damien Woody, Kris Jenkins and Brett Favre, and with the exception of the latter, I didn’t hear anyone calling them “mercenaries” then. But now that we’ve grown too big for our britches, now that we’ve got the talent and the leadership to go all the way, idiots like Mike Florio deride the very formula that has brought us success. I don’t believe there is some kind of worldwide anti-Jets conspiracy, but, for now at least, most media outlets seem to enjoy dirtying our laundry and airing it out for us.