The Nfl

Fast and Furious
With a dazzling display of speed and power, the Jets have shot to the top of the AFC East

You get a sense watching the Jets that this isn't your father's football team. The Jets are starting to look like the team the Cowboys built a decade ago, with track athletes turned loose at most every key position. "We're kind of like the Florida State of the NFL," second-year defensive end John Abraham said after the league's most intriguing team ran circles around the Dolphins 24-0 in Miami. "We're a bunch of fast players making plays."

The Jets have won four straight (including three on the road), and they get scarier by the week. They've allowed an average of seven points and 222 yards per game during the streak. They go into their bye week, stunningly, at 7-3 and atop the AFC East.

Reasons abound. Curtis Martin is 17 yards from his seventh 1,000-yard season in seven pro years. The offensive line is a mobile wall. Quarterback Vinny Testaverde is playing efficiently. The team is a league-high plus-22 in takeaways; against Miami, New York won the turnover battle 5-0. Problems with the run defense—the Rams piled up 234 rushing yards in New York's last loss, on Oct. 21—have been solved by plugging Steve Martin and Shane Burton into new defensive coordinator Ted Cottrell's 4-3 scheme.

However, the underlying reason for the success of so much of what the Jets are doing—the fierce outside pass rush, the stretching of opposing defenses by the wideouts—is speed. The poster children are first-and third-round picks from Bill Parcells's last draft, in 2000. Abraham is as valuable to the Jets as Michael Strahan, the best defensive end in the game, is to the other team that plays at the Meadowlands. Wideout Laveranues Coles, who was joined on Sunday by fellow burner Santana Moss (making his NFL debut), unsettles defenses.

As for Abraham, he has 14� sacks in 16 career games. He is hardly one-dimensional, though. Struggling to get something going in the third quarter, the Dolphins put wideout James McKnight in motion from the left to catch a shovel pass from quarterback Jay Fiedler. The instant that McKnight cradled the ball, Abraham, who was making a beeline for Fiedler from the left side of the defense, changed directions and slammed McKnight to the turf after a one-yard gain.

You can't teach the kind of speed and quickness or the football sense, reminiscent of Lawrence Taylor's, that the 23-year-old Abraham displays. "He's having the same kind of impact LT had," says Testaverde, who played against Taylor.

Abraham almost lost out on his chance to play football. He broke his leg playing in a pickup game in middle school in South Carolina, and his mother, Maggie, wouldn't let him play for three years. Maggie relented when John was a senior, and he played well enough to earn a scholarship to South Carolina. He lined up at outside linebacker and defensive end, survived a 1-21 record over his final two seasons and so impressed the Jets with his speed rush (at 252 pounds, he ran the 40 in 4.41) that they made him the 13th pick in the draft.

Limited to six games at outside linebacker last year because of an abdominal injury, Abraham has flourished since being moved to end by new coach Herman Edwards. His 10 sacks lead the AFC. "I'm comfortable wherever they put me, as long as I can make plays," says Abraham. "There's no question speed is crucial to my game."

Coles doesn't lack speed, either. (Like Moss, he runs a 4-3 40.) Split left in single coverage at the Miami 17 late in the second quarter, he took rookie cornerback Jamar Fletcher to school. Coles faked left, then right and finally left again before Testaverde hit him in stride for a touchdown, putting New York up 14-0.