Be quiet: Talk of playoffs is flabbergasting after performances like Sunday’s in Seattle

It feels over. It really does this time.

Yes, the Jets were 4-6 in 2009 and still made the AFC Championship game after it appeared the ship was sinking.

The Jets said it themselves after even the fifth loss of that season, a crushing home defeat to the Jaguars.

“We’re on life support,” Damien Woody said.

Rex Ryan described the Jets’ playoff chances as “not good.”

2012 is different in plenty of ways, the most prominent an entrenched attitude of superiority.

These Jets didn’t eat crow at 3-5 during the bye week coming off a thrashing by a division rival at home.

They talked - just as they do best.

““The Jets will make the playoffs this year,” Cromartie said on Thursday.

“All of us, in my opinion, believe we can make it,” Ryan said. “This team is much closer than I think our team was, my team was, last year.”

They can’t shut their mouths.

Sunday’s 28-7 drubbing in Seattle surely should.

"We thought we were prepared...Knew we were prepared,” Ryan said after the loss.

If that performance was prepared, I don’t want to know what unprepared looks like. Jim Mora’s ‘Playoffs?’ tangent would be the best response to Ryan’s comments that this team is “much closer.”

At 3-6, the Jets are not mathematically eliminated, especially in an AFC that is particularly weak. But it feels a whole lot worse at six losses this year than it did in 2009.

Those losses were gut-wrenching, close games where the team wasn’t finishing. They were painful to watch but not in the same way the losses have been this year.

In half their losses this season, the Jets have looked completely bewildered right from the outset. They lost by 34 to the 49ers and 21 to the Dolphins and Seahawks. Those are all good defenses but the Jets’ offensive performances were abominations.

This is a group that scored 48 against the Bills and 35 against the Colts. But when they’re not playing a mediocre defense, they’re stuck in neutral or sometimes reverse, barreling backward, gas on the pedal, over the cliff.

You have self-destruction that is so astounding to watch unfold that you almost can’t believe your eyes. This game it came in the first quarter when 3rd and goal at the 1 became 3rd and goal at the 6, then turned into an interception and no points.

The Jets lingered, the defense doing yeoman’s work much of the time to keep them in the game, but they could never score again after that blown chance. It was the fourth time in nine games the Jets have scored 10 or less points.

Before talking playoffs again, the Jets need to find a way to put up points.

Bluster needs to go bye-bye.

It’s time to get real.

Belief is not bad but has to be carried by something tangible. Otherwise, it’s called delusion.

By continuing to talk and not produce, that’s where the Jets are miring themselves.

A couple more losses and the playoffs are no longer even a mathematical consideration. With a roster so bereft of offensive talent, it hasn’t been a very logical one for awhile.

Next week it all comes to a head when they face former offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer and the Rams, whose overtime performance in their tie with the 49ers almost made the Jets’ Week 10 showing look redeemable.

If the Jets can’t beat their former assistant who was the first to be shown the door, it’s only a matter of time before a new suspect takes the fall.

That will be reality - a cold, hard one.