Geno Smith had his jaw broken today by a rookie teammate, a defensive end coming to collect $600 Smith owed him.  ^a I spent some of the morning trying to figure out if the New York media turns the Jets and Mets into punchlines or if they do it themselves. I suppose it’s a little of both.

More interesting to me, the sports history nerd, is that Geno isn’t the first Jets QB to suffer a broken jaw.

In 1967, in a bloodfeud game against the Oakland Raiders, Joe Namath got physically tortured; hit low, hit late, hit hard. The Raiders that day were vicious and cheap, and Ike Davidson caught Namath as he was rolling to his left, blowing his helmet off his head and breaking his jaw.

Namath stayed in the game and threw for 370 yards in the Jets loss. Al Davis added insult to injury by having a photo of the hit blown up and displayed at Raiders HQ.

The OG Jets QB with the broken jaw. Namath later said he broke it on a tough piece of steak for whatever reason pic.twitter.com/CGfRCpbufZ

— Matt Walks (@mgwalks) August 11, 2015

Instead, we got Geno’s lame Terminator Instagram picture. I was born in the wrong decade.

Postscript: The Jets’ big opportunity for revenge came during the infamous “Heidi Bowl,” when NBC executives chose to cut away from a narrow Jets/Raiders game to broadcast a heartwarming TV movie about an orphan girl.

It’d be like if ESPN inexplicably started showing the new Annie movie during Monday Night Football.

NBC’s half-hearted attempt to make ameliorate the situation blew up in its face when it displayed the score of the game –revealing Oakland’s dramatic comeback win — across the screen during the movie’s emotional climax.

“Picture a very swift torrent, a river rushing down between rocky walls. There is a long, shallow bar of sand and gravel that runs right down the middle of the river. It is under water. You are born, and you have to stand on that narrow submerged bar, where everyone stands. The ones born before you, the ones older than you, are upriver from you. The younger ones stand braced on the bar downriver. And the whole long bar is slowly moving down that river of time, washing away at the upstream end and building up downstream.

“Your time, the time of all your contemporaries, schoolmates, your loves and your adversaries, is that part of the shifting bar on which you stand. And it is crowded at first. You can see the way it things out, upstream from you. The old ones are washed away and their bodies go swiftly by, like logs in the current. Downstream where the younger ones stand thick, you can see them flounder, lose footing, wash away.

“Always there is more room where you stand, but always the swift water grows deeper, and you feel the shift of the sand and the gravel under your feet as the river wears it away. Someone looking for a safer place can nudge you off balance, and you are gone. Someone who has stood beside you for a long time gives a forlorn cry and you reach to catch their hand, but the fingertips slide away and they are gone. There are the sounds in the rocky gorge, the roar of the water, the shifting, gritty sound of sand and gravel underfoot, the forlorn cries of despair as the nearby ones, and the ones upstream, are taken by the current. Some old ones who stand on a good place, well braced, understanding currents and balance, last a long time. A Churchill, fat cigar atilt, sourly amused at his own endurance and, in the end, indifferent to rivers and the rage of waters.

“Far downstream from you are the thing, startled cries of the ones who never got planted, never got set, never quite understood the message of the torrent.”

You get to the bottom, and you can feel it, feel the cold, rocky edge of it all scrape your face, and you realize that’s why it’s called rock bottom.  

“We have been made aware,” she writes. “It’s taken care of.” Don’t end a sentence with a preposition. Don’t end a sentence with a preposition. Don’t end a sentence with a preposition.

Somewhere in the dusty lazy Susan of the mind an old Oasis song plays one decibel too loud.

And I want you to know / I got my mind made up now / But I need more time 

Suddenly you realize  that you talk to all your ex-girlfriends, even the ones that live overseas, even the ones that told you they hated you, always would hate you, hate your penchant for emotional forgery and your constant masochistic tendency to grow bored with the warmth of a beautiful, boring woman. You talk to them, and you say kind and genuine things about them. You compliment their new boyfriends, who all have long hair and sometimes have the same name as you.

She is electric / Can I be electric too?

You read the blotter report in the newspaper the other day. A friend of a friend had been arrested for a vaguely sexual offense in the next town over. It made you nauseous.

“I like it when you’re under the ocean and all you can feel is calm,” she writes. “Will you write about me?”

This weather is making everyone crazy. People’s brains are baking in the sun. Stand up, dammit. Stand up! One foot after the other. Reach up, dig your fingers in. You’re on the curb with the bread, your sunglasses are gone and you will have to learn everything all over again.

August is not august.