Sports of The Times: Burress Finds Redemption Within His Sizable Reach

It was his fault. Plaxico Burress gave no trace of the “Just Give Me the Damn Ball!” attitude that Keyshawn Johnson did in the title of his book in 1997, early in his Jets days.

By all accounts, Burress has been working to fit into the Jets’ offense, after 622 days in prison for carrying a gun into a nightclub in 2008. He wasn’t totally invisible early this season, with 14 receptions and 2 touchdowns in his first six games, but Burress accepted as fact that he was not living up to his own goals, and the hopes of the Jets and his fans.

Burress carried the expectations with him. A willowy receiver, still only 34, could not have totally rusted away in prison. Could he?

“It was feeling worse than it looked,” Burress insisted Sunday after catching touchdown passes of 3, 4 and 3 yards in a 27-21 comeback victory over the San Diego Chargers. He was perfectly willing to credit the touchdowns to the right calls by Mark Sanchez on man-to-man coverage from a cornerback, Antoine Cason, who is listed as four inches shorter than Burress’s 6 feet 5 inches. Burress was also willing to attribute his touchdowns to his acclimation to a new team, a new system.

Everybody knows where he has been. Up the river. Away. Out of circulation. It is the unspoken fact, the P-word. When a reporter says “rust,” everybody knows what that means.

“It takes a little time to get these routes down,” Burress said. “It’s coming. It’s a work in progress. It always is.”

He reported to the Jets in August after missing two full seasons and part of the previous season when a concealed pistol went off, hitting him in the leg, and fortunately doing no more damage in a crowded club. The foolishness suggested somebody who totally did not get it, whatever it is, and could conceivably be just as numb in reporting to the Last Chance Saloon run by the garrulous border gambler himself, Rex Ryan.

But out of this, Burress has emerged as, at least, a teammate, a self-critic.

“You can’t just plug in somebody else after throwing to Braylon Edwards for two years,” Sanchez said, referring to the wide receiver, not exactly an early bird himself, the Jets allowed to walk to make room for Burress.

After six weeks, the Jets were floundering at three victories and three losses, and the summary judgment was that Burress was failing.

“I think a lot of people are putting pressure on him — but not in our building,” Sanchez said.

There is plenty of pressure already on the Jets, some of it put there by the rat-a-tat faux pas from the coach, who did it again last week when he said he would have had a couple of Super Bowl rings by now if he had been chosen coach of the Chargers back in 2007. He had to use up a lot of minutes on his phone to say the right things to Norv Turner, who had gotten the job instead.

Outbursts like these, whether intentional or not, are part of Ryan’s outsize charm. They also put pressure on the Jets to keep up with the sideshows, the controversies.

Actually, somebody else in the building was putting pressure on Burress. The receiver admitted — has been saying all along — that he was not doing his part in fitting into the offense.

“You get so tired of seeing yourself looking bad on film,” Burress said late Sunday afternoon, after his three touchdowns rescued the Jets and Ryan from a humiliation. Burress was the security device — open if needed — that made up for two turnovers, including an interception by Sanchez.

Burress’s touchdowns came in the second, third and fourth quarters. They followed a clumsy miss from Sanchez in the general direction of where Burress was expected to be, up the middle, in the first quarter. Burress saw it as more of the same. He knew where he should have been. He just did not get there as precisely as he should have.

“I said, ‘Hey, man, I didn’t get there,’ ” Burress said later.

This is not for lack of trying, for lack of attention. That is what Sanchez was saying afterward. He said Burress underlined his own routes in the playbook, studied them, worked on them in practice, asked questions like “What about this?” — which is not the same thing as demanding the ball.

“He’s such a big body; you have to stay with him,” Sanchez said, referring to Burress’s wingspan as much as his height.

“You’ve got to feed your studs,” the quarterback added.

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That began to happen in the normal flow of the game. The Jets recognized that Cason was picking up Burress. With the boobirds already warming up their larynxes, Sanchez hit Burress up high in each of the last three quarters, and Burress said it dated to the way the offensive coordinator, Brian Schottenheimer, kept working with him in practice. The opposite was also true. Burress has never demanded the Jets get the ball to him. On Sunday, they did.

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For the Jets, Sanchez and Burress Cram Chemistry Class

That receiver was Plaxico Burress — in 2005. In his first six games for the Giants that season, working with a first-year starter in Eli Manning, Burress caught 36 passes for 535 yards and 5 touchdowns.

But that receiver is also Plaxico Burress in 2011. In his first six games for the Jets this season, working with a third-year starter in Mark Sanchez, Burress has caught 14 passes for 218 yards and 2 touchdowns.

As Burress recalls, it took him longer — much longer, he said — than six games to develop harmony with Manning in 2005, even if the statistics suggest otherwise. With Sanchez, nothing is misleading.

“One thing for sure,” Burress said of their on-field chemistry, “it can’t get any worse.”

Burress was not faulting Sanchez. He was merely stating the obvious. The Jets ended Burress’s 28-month prison-induced hiatus from the N.F.L. in July by signing him to a one-year, $3.017 million contract. He was supposed to serve as Sanchez’s deep threat, a red-zone mismatch at 6 feet 5 inches, to complement Santonio Holmes.

So far, Sanchez has thrown eight deep passes — of at least 20 yards — to Burress, completing three, according to the Web site ProFootballFocus.com. In the red zone, Burress has caught one touchdown pass, Sept. 25 at Oakland, while also contributing as a superb blocker.

Burress said he was growing more comfortable with Sanchez, with the Jets’ offense; no longer does he break from the huddle and jog the wrong way. They are trying to compensate for time missed during training camp and the lockout, and each has acknowledged his culpability.

Burress has three drops, all in the last two games, which he attributed to being “so confident doing what you do that you get a little lazy” focusing on the ball and watching it hit his hands. Coach Rex Ryan said Sanchez had looked away from Burress too early, including on the first play of Monday’s game, when he misfired to Shonn Greene. Sanchez struggles with his accuracy to begin with, so the lack of repetitions compounded the impact.

“You’ve got to throw those routes hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times to where you can almost throw them with your eyes closed,” Sanchez said. “And then, you just react to what’s going on around you.”

Every day, he said, they work on routes, on timing, on learning each other’s tendencies. Burress said he was competitive, not frustrated. Sanchez said he could not blame Burress if he did feel frustrated, praising his positive attitude. Sanchez called Burress “a different car” in his garage of receivers. “They have a different feel,” Sanchez said. “They handle a little different.”

But if Holmes and Jeremy Kerley, the speedsters, drive like Corvettes, then what type of car fits Burress, whom Sanchez called “a big, rangy guy”? An Escalade? A minivan? And does it even matter if the car will not start?

Much has changed for Burress over the last six years — the prison stay, for starters — and he sometimes appears to have trouble gaining separation from cornerbacks, unable to stretch opposing defenses as he once did. The Jets have tried. Of the 34 passes directed his way, 16 were thrown to the middle of the field, according to ProFootballFocus, countering the theory that Burress is deployed mostly down the sidelines. Ryan also said that teams had used deceptive schemes to double-cover Burress at times.

“If the coverage is a certain way,” Ryan said, “then the ball should be thrown somewhere else.”

The four times Sanchez did throw toward Burress on Monday night revealed the scope of their disconnect. The first, which did not come until 5 minutes 17 seconds remained in the third quarter, sailed high in the end zone. The second, on a quick slant, was caught for 16 yards.

The next two evoked criticism from the “Monday Night Football” analysts Jon Gruden and Ron Jaworski. After Burress dropped a 15-yard pass, Gruden said Burress ran a “poor” route and needed to get out of his break better. After Sanchez overthrew Burress by about 10 yards on a deep pass down the sideline, Jaworski said it looked as if Burress was “loafing.”

Asked if he felt rusty, Burress said he did not. Asked if he felt he still ran as well as used to, Burress said he did. Which perhaps is why he hardly seemed worried about improving his timing with Sanchez, saying it does not form in the first six games. But, he was asked, did it develop within the first 16?

“No doubt about it,” Burress said. “No doubt.”

EXTRA POINTS

For perhaps the first time, Rex Ryan apologized for guaranteeing a Super Bowl title. Ryan told San Diego reporters that if he had been selected as the Chargers’ coach over Norv Turner in 2007, “I think I would have had a couple rings” because “those teams were loaded.” Ryan called Turner to clarify his remarks, saying he did not mean to offend him.

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