Jets can gain upper hand on Pats for AFC East title

FLORHAM PARK, N.J. - Shaun Ellis thought for a second, repeating the question before he scanned his memory bank.

The 33-year-old defensive end is the longest-tenured Jet, having spent all of his 11 seasons with the franchise. So if anyone can gauge the significance of the Jets' road matchup with the Patriots on Monday night, it's Ellis.

They've had a few big regular-season games in his time here, but even he had to agree that this game against the Jets' AFC East rival is in a different stratosphere.

"Yeah, yeah," Ellis said Monday. "It's one of the biggest ones."

A win over the Patriots (9-2) would give the Jets (9-2) a strong grasp on first place: They would have a 2-0 record against New England and a 4-0 division mark. It also would give the Jets their first sweep of the Patriots since 2000, allowing them to clear a hefty mental hurdle.

"It would mean a lot," Ellis said. "For so long, those have been the guys that you've got to beat, and not just our division, the whole league. And to be able to go in in this fashion, both 9-2, it would be a great deal if we could get it done."

Especially when you consider the Jets essentially made a few tweaks to their roster to dethrone the Patriots, who won the division title in seven of the previous nine seasons. The most obvious move was plucking cornerback Kyle Wilson off the draft board in April, hoping he'd be able to slide in as the starting nickel and handle wide receiver Wes Welker, who made 15 catches for 192 yards against the Jets last November in Foxborough, Mass.

"I felt like we needed to get another corner to match up with New England," Rex Ryan said. "We drafted Kyle Wilson and that was to try to beat New England and Indianapolis and whoever else got in our way. We tried to build our team to win a Super Bowl. We thought to win a Super Bowl, you have to beat New England. So we'll see if that blueprint works or not."

Besides seeing if their offseason moves and game-planning pan out against the Patriots in the way they envisioned, the Jets view this as a legitimate shot to measure themselves against one of the NFL's elite teams.

They figure it's a chance to prove they can hold their own against the big boys, something a few observers have questioned, given their string of last-minute wins against four below-.500 teams - Denver, Cleveland, Detroit and Houston - before they finally pasted the Bengals on Thanksgiving night.

"I think it will be huge in a couple of regards," Braylon Edwards said. "One, I feel it will show who we really feel we really are, and it will show the type of respect that we need, and we want, and we think that we deserve. That's first and foremost.

"And two, it will show dominance, pretty much 4-0 in the division. Everybody pretty much thinks the Patriots are that team regardless of what we've done in the past, so it will just separate us from the rest of the AFC."

Still, there's a contingent that's making sure the Jets don't get engulfed by the hype. Despite the playoff implications - Bart Scott raised the possibility that an AFC team with an 11-5 record could be left on the outside looking in - they will try their best to take the even-keel approach.

"You have to treat it like it's another game," said former Dolphin Jason Taylor, no stranger to these battles with the Patriots. "You understand the magnitude of it, but you can't get too high about it, you can't get too anxious.

"In my opinion, you approach it like a regular week. We have things we need to focus on and fix and do better as a team, and that's our focus this week - to do what we do better than they do what they do.

"It's a simple formula, but the game's played on Monday night and we'll see how it works out."

Said Santonio Holmes: "This is just another game in front of us right now with a hot team, and we've got to cool those guys off."