09/23 — This is a big day for the Jets in a lot of ways. It's Wayne Chrebet Day, and No. 80 is in the house and getting ready for the halftime ceremonies to remember his career in green and white.

"Someone will speak, and then I'll speak, which'll be real short," Wayne told me. "I'm not sure what I'm going to say, but I just need to let all the people who were there for me know how appreciative my family and I are for them being there all 11 years."

No surprise that a good percentage of the early arrivers in the stadium are wearing their green No. 80 jerseys.

It's also a big day for the Jets and the Dolphins, both of which are 0-2 and neither of which wants to sink into the black hole of an 0-3 start.

Greg Buttle, on the Jets pregame show on ESPN Radio an hour ago, was very succinct on the subject.

"In 1981 we started 0-3," the former standout Jets linebacker recalled. "We had a pretty good team that year and we couldn't understand why that was happening.

"Jets fans are shaking their heads like I was back then and wondering, 'Why me?' I couldn't figure it out back then and I can't figure it out now, but the Jets had better figure it out like we did. I can say pretty much this is a must game. A watershed game? Not yet, but a must-game."

Those Jets of Buttle and Jets radio analyst Marty Lyons, on the other side of the glass booth next to me in the pressbox, overcame that 0-3 start — actually, they were 1-3-1 after five weeks — to finish 10-5-1 and make it to the playoffs.

But they were one of the few so lucky and skilled in NFL history. Since 1970, only four other teams started 0-3 and qualified for the postseason: the '82 strike-season Buccaneers, '92 Chargers, '95 Lions and '98 Bills. And you can throw in the 1970 Raiders , who started 0-2-1, if you like.

Hopefully for Jets fans, we won't have to go into any more detail than that after today.

Chad Pennington is on the field and looking decent. On one play, the quarterback took a five-stop drop, looked to his left, then slung a pass out to his right to Marques Tuiasosopo. No announcement yet as to whether he'll start on his sore ankle or if it's Kellen Clemens again.

These players definitely won't play for the Jets today, having been deactivated: S Abram Elam, LB Cody Spencer, newly signed OL Will Montgomery, DL Mike DeVito, rookie OL Jacob Bender and TEs Jason Pociask and Sean Ryan (who got a number of reps at Baltimore in two-TE sets). Tuiasosopo is the third QB.

For the Dolphins, the inactives are rookie RB Lorenzo Booker, safeties Donovin Darius and Courtney Bryan, LBs Zach Thomas and Abraham Wright and DTs Steve Fifita and Rodrique Wright, with rookie John Beck as the third QB.

Interesting sartorial choice: The Jets are wearing their green jerseys with white pants and the Dolphins are in their all-whites. It's in the low 70s now and is not expected to be super-hot today, but it could have been and it will be sunny under a cloudless sky. Hot-site teams generally want to get visitors coming to their stadiums in the darker colors.

However, upon further review, the Jets have chosen to wear their green tops for every home game against Miami going back to at least 1998. Hmmm ... We'll see if there's a uni-fied theory to the Green & White's choice of colors in less than four hours.

One uniform change worth noting: The Jets just came out of the tunnel accompanied by the 10-member Jets Flight Crew — all of whom are wearing No. 80 jerseys in honor of Chrebet.