Jets prove able ghost busters

The ghosts of new years past pursued the New York Jets to Oakland. But in the end they turned on the home team.

The Jets have a reputation for trembling on the brink of the play-offs. December is traditionally a bad month for them. They scramble into position for a run at the Super Bowl, then somehow miss the starter's gun.

The Jets were a point down going into the last minute on Sunday, when their last drive stalled just past the halfway line. Who you gonna call? On came John Hall, the kicker who was delisted by the Jets last season after one miss too many. The range was a formidable 53 yards.

The snap was low. The ball was fumbled. As Hall ran in, the ball was lying on its side. No way was it going 53 yards on this trip.

Only Tom Tupa somehow got the ball upright just as Hall swung his leg. The kick was on the button. And the Jets won 24-22 to gain a place in the play-offs for only the seventh time in the franchise's 42-year history.

Those ghosts must have been busted, the Jets' coach Herman Edwards reckoned. "What this football team does is, we try to exterminate ghosts," he said. "Every time we play, there's another ghost."

Maybe they just got tired. "There's a lot of things that have been said, that we couldn't win in December, we couldn't win here, we couldn't win there," Wayne Chrebet said. "It's a new era. This is the Herman Edwards era. So we had a pretty decent December, and we're having a pretty good 2002 so far. We're trying to forget about all those old demons."

Or maybe they changed sides. "Basically," Newsday's Ken Berger reported, "things that usually happen to the Jets happened to the other team."

Neither team looked quite ready for the play-offs. The Jets turned the ball over three times. Their quarterback, the 38-year-old Vinny Testaverde, threw two interceptions. Their kicking team mangled their final snap.

But the Oakland Raiders may have been worse. Their quarterback, Rich Gannon, misfired more comprehensively than Testaverde. They had a punt blocked to give away a touchdown. And their kicker Brad Daluiso missed a field goal from a mere 28 yards.

He will have a chance to redeem himself. Though the Raiders lost their last three games of the regular season, they have won the American Conference Western Division and with it the third seed in the AFC play-offs. Depending on the result of tonight's game in Baltimore, they could open the play-offs on Saturday with another visit from the Jets.

The Jets will have to travel whatever happens. If Baltimore beat Minnesota tonight, which they are expected to do, the Jets will return to Oakland. If Minnesota were to pull off an upset, Baltimore would be eliminated, the Seattle Seahawks would be reprieved and the Jets would have to go to Miami, where they have no demons. They have beaten the Dolphins eight times in a row.

The last weekend of the regular season largely lacked its customary drama. The New York Giants' Michael Strahan broke the NFL single-season record for quarterback sacks with 22½. Priest Holmes of the Kansas City Chiefs won the NFL rushing title with 1,555 yards. And the major issue - who would win the American Conference Eastern Division title - was duly settled in favour of the New England Patriots, who crushed the toothless Carolina Panthers 38-6 in Charlotte.

The Panthers committed six turnovers in becoming the first team to lose 15 successive games in a season. The crowd of 21,070 was less than half the previous franchise low. And George Siefert, the coach who when they recruited him had the best win-loss ratio of any coach in the history of the NFL, was sacked today.

On the instructions of the club owner Jerry Richardson, Siefert purged the team of many of its best-paid players last winter. But his efforts at rebuilding proved catastrophic.

"It didn't work out," said Richardson, while failing to acknowledge his own part in the team's decline. " Starting today, we're going to be pumping the energy back into the team."

Who they gonna call? The favourite is Steve Spurrier, who resigned as head coach at the University of Florida on Friday saying that he wanted to pursue a career in the NFL.