King said in the days before the Jets knocked off the Patriots, Rex Ryan went to his staff and defensive team leaders and asked them for suggestions on how to stop the Patriots offense. Explained King: “He said, ‘Listen, if you’ve got some ideas, give them to us. We’re looking to do new things to try to confuse the Patriots.’ And I think what they ended up doing was basically fairly consistently putting [Antonio] Cromartie and [Darrelle] Revis alone with whoever the Patriots put outside. It wouldn’t have mattered whether it was [Wes] Welker, it wouldn’t have mattered whether it was Deion Branch — I guess most often it was probably Deion Branch and [Brandon] Tate.

“And they said we’re not going to concentrate — I’m not saying we never will — but we’re not going to concentrate on giving them any safety help. They’ll just handle those guys, and then we’re going to cloud the middle of the field, and we’re going to make Tom Brady, when he looks over the field, we’re going to make him look at traffic everywhere he looks. I think that’s, in essence, a lot of what happened in this game.”

As for why the Patriots were not able to successfully combat the Jets’ strategy, King said: ”I’m not really sure what you can do without either sort of the blazing speed or the big, type Calvin Johnson or Randy Moss in his prime on the outside to really affect the game.