Jets ready to turn the tables on Patriots

Just 35 days have passed since the Jets sauntered off into the New England night, downtrodden after a nine-point defeat.

They were a beaten bunch, left searching deeply for answers on how to turn their season around. Talk of a fractured locker room started reaching a crescendo after that 31-20 Week 5 loss, and it was growing with rapid intensity. They had dropped three consecutive games and appeared to be closing in on a dangerous abyss.

But the Jets (5-3) have dusted themselves off, regained their confidence and ride a three-game winning streak into tonight's pivotal AFC East matchup with the Patriots at MetLife Stadium.

"Well, I think nobody really lost sight of our goals a month ago when we were going through a tough stretch of three games," Mark Sanchez said, "but we knew that everything we wanted would be right ahead of us if we just stayed the course and fought through it. I've just been proud of the last three weeks of the way we really worked through three tough losses at one point in the season.

"So this is right where we want to be and there's no better team that we'd want to play than a division rival and a divisional opponent, for [a game that] looks to set us up real nice in the division if we win."

That's what Rex Ryan has been preaching to his team for the better part of the last month, something few detractors probably thought was possible. However, the Jets enter Sunday's action perched atop the division standings with the same record as the Patriots and Bills.

They're set to square off with a Patriots team that is trying to avoid losing a third game in a row for the first time in nine seasons.

SEE PHOTOSJets-Patriots rivalry through the years

"If that really is an ambition of yours to win your division, then you want to see where you stack up with them," Ryan said. "Obviously that first game, they were better than us. I said it right after we played them. They were the better team then. We'll see who the better team is now. I think we're a better team than we were then. I've said it the whole time. We'll see if we're ahead of them right now."

The Jets think they have vastly improved in just about every facet.

Their third-down conversion rate is markedly better, allowing them to sustain drives such as the 15-play marathon they had in last week's steamrollering of the Bills. They're capitalizing, for the most part, on scoring opportunities, and also have been getting after it defensively, putting serious heat on the opposition and collecting more turnovers.

Factor that in with a special teams unit that boasts the NFL's top kickoff returner in Joe McKnight, who has 603 kickoff return yards and one touchdown on 15 attempts, and it has the Jets feeling pretty good about themselves.

"We've come together," rookie wide receiver Jeremy Kerley said. "We are clicking almost on all cylinders, and for us to click on all cylinders is a scary thing. So definitely our offense has picked up, our defense is playing good football, as usual, and our special teams is playing hard as usual. So if we put everything together, man, we'll be all right."

The Jets have had New England's number at home the past two seasons, outscoring them 44-23, and they can't afford a slip up Sunday night. With the Patriots already knocking them off a month ago, a loss to New England could prove to be a death blow down the line for the Jets' playoff hopes, given the Patriots would have swept the season series.

"Those are the first things that come in play when you think about tiebreakers," linebacker Bart Scott said, "and to put ourselves in a tough spot, to hope that we can finish with a better division record than them after losing to them twice, that's kind of hard to do. You can't expect this team to lose too many more games.

"So you have to take care of business while you can. You don't want other people to have to do work for you. You want to have to do it yourself."

That's certainly what the Jets have been doing lately in their three-game rebound, a run that's silenced the skeptics and has Ryan's crew in position to thrust themselves back into conversations centering around the AFC's elite teams.

"It was never in our vision to be counted out," wideout Santonio Holmes said, "but everybody else did because we lost three games in a row. Things happen, but this is the NFL and they're supposed to happen. We're still looking forward to being where we want to be at, which is playing in this Super Bowl come February."