04/16 — One of the elements of the Jets' 2008 schedule released by the NFL Tuesday, that jumped out at me was that September situation involving Games 3 and 4.

The Sept. 22 Monday night game at San Diego in itself is nice. It's good that the Green & White are back on MNF after a one-year hiatus. The Jets should be reinvigorated from their off-season acquisitions, their third training camp under head coach Eric Mangini and the first two games of the season against division foes Miami and New England. And going up against LaDainian Tomlinson, Shawne Merriman and the Chargers on a national stage should be exciting.

But why would the league send an East Coast team to the West Coast for a Monday night game, then schedule that team back home for a 1 p.m. Sunday game? Why not a bye week? Or, if prime time for SD was important, why not a Sunday night game?

Think about it. After the charter flight lands back in New York and the team is bused back to its Weeb Ewbank Hall, it may well be 7 or 8 a.m. Tuesday. I'm getting better at sleeping on planes in my old age, but red-eyes have never been my favorite mattress and I can only imagine how the players will feel after the wear and tear of an NFL game and their naps during the 5½-hour flight home.

Needless to say, the coach will tailor the team's schedule for the short week leading up to the Arizona game. But in a way this week will be as tough on the system as a Sunday-Thursday pairing of games. And the Jets already have that in November with their first NFL Network Thursday night game at New England, plus, as we already knew, three other West Coast trips.

I wondered how often this kind of situation has arisen in the NFL. I went back to 2002 looking for all the Eastern Time Zone teams that were scheduled to play either on the West Coast or in the Mountain Time Zone (Denver and Arizona) on a Monday night.

The situation doesn't come up a lot. In fact, no teams were so scheduled last season or in '04.

In '06, Baltimore went to Denver and in '05 Pittsburgh traveled to San Diego. Both came back home the next week and lost.

In '03, New England also had a Monday nighter at Denver. The Patriots got their bye the next week. And the Steelers were crunched that season, going to San Francisco for a Monday nighter and following that with a road game (although not too far away at Cleveland, which the Steelers won).

Then there was 2002, and the Jets were in that same schedule bind. And you know what? They came out of it all right. They lost that Monday night game at Oakland (made even longer by the Raiders' third-quarter celebration of Tim Brown reaching 1,000 career receptions) by 26-20, then straggled home, got it together and beat the Broncos at the Meadowlands the next Sunday.

I guess the point of all this is that we all have our beefs with any given year's schedule for our team, but in the immortal words of Laveranues Coles, It Is What It Is. The '02 Jets showed there is a way to overcome this particular matter, and one thing we know Mangini will stress is having his players ready to deal with adversity, whether it's the schedule handed down from above or the precipitation falling from the sky.

Add in the benefits of the new Atlantic Health Jets Training Center that will be the Green & White's new home soon after the conclusion of this summer's training camp (see my story on the Training Center that just went up on newyorkjets.com), and perhaps these frequent-flyer Jets can come together as the NFL's 2008 road warriors.

Time to Talk Draft

It's that time of year for all NFL teams to have their leaders go in front of the media and eloquently say as little as possible about what they intend to do in the draft.

The Jets' predraft news conference will be held Thursday afternoon at the team's training complex, with general manager Mike Tannenbaum, director of player personnel Terry Bradway and director of college scouting Joey Clinkscales coming down from their second-floor offices to answer questions from print, TV and radio reporters.

The news conference will be streamed live on newyorkjets.com beginning at 1:15 p.m. and we'll have stories on the site after the event breaks up.