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" In the rhythm of the National Football League, Week 5 really sucks. It&amp;#039;s the end of the beginning, and so, too, its best laid plans. Teams begin to diverge. Injuries mount, luck stays home, exhaustion takes hold (or it starts going awfully well), new faces get introduced for next year&amp;#039;s DirecTV commercials, and the games grind down to sleepy, textbook endings in which the better team wins by a margin slightly under the line \u2014 not that victory was ever really much in doubt. By now there are two paths, and we all know which one the Jets are walking: the one where everything hurts. Truth is, the Jets were plenty game on Monday night, despite it&amp;#039;s having become obvious that Tim Tebow&amp;#039;s occasional run isn&amp;#039;t going to solve Mark Sanchez&amp;#039;s consistently underpowered, consistently inaccurate arm. There was Sanchez, with his here-goes throwing motion, as if hopefully calling out numbers in Battleship after every huddle. &amp;quot;Wobbly&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;garbage&amp;quot; were words not infrequently shouted and tweeted at television screens across New Jersey and New York on Monday night, even if &amp;quot;great quarterback&amp;quot; were the ones coming back from Jon Gruden inside of them. In a league of steel-armed quarterbacks who are throwing harder than before \u2014 Christian Ponder, say, or Matt Ryan and RGIII \u2014 there was Sanchez and his eephus, chucking from the parking lot, willing it close enough to the beach. Now, I still can&amp;#039;t stand Tebow. I don&amp;#039;t like his look-at-me religion, his wicked case of the blank-eyed rah-rahs, or the vainglorious isolation he so hungrily occupies on a sideline full of teammates and coaches. But Mark Sanchez can&amp;#039;t throw the ball over an aluminum garage can right now. He looks beaten. Like sandlot beaten. Like poke-him-hard-on-the-way-home-and-he&amp;#039;ll-cry beaten. Is there chemistry between them? Nothing. Zip. When Tebow looks up, he&amp;#039;s mouthing the words to &amp;quot;C is for Cookie.&amp;quot; Whereas when Sanchez lifts his eyes, it looks like he&amp;#039;s thinking, &amp;quot;What the fuck? Is it snowing already?&amp;quot; Much as I hate to say it, Rex ought to crank up the roller coaster by now: It&amp;#039;s time to stick Tebow in there. It&amp;#039;s time the Jets abandon this vague and tenuous two-man, semi-throwing rotation \u2014 a once-a-decade coaching foible that never, ever works, but manages to keep &amp;#039;em blabbing at ESPN, giggling at Fox, straightening their two-for-one Jos A. Bank neckties at NBC, and tapping the microphones on the NFL Network. The Jets are still playing hard enough to win, despite the fact that everything&amp;#039;s about to go to pieces. Yeah, they&amp;#039;re on that one path. Still, who knows? Week 5 showed their defense looks lively, even without Darrelle Revis, and they continue to return kickoffs better than anyone. So they forgot to pick up a running back in the offseason \u2014 they&amp;#039;ve got Tebow! Now give him to us for fuck&amp;#039;s sake, before it starts to snow. It&amp;#039;s Week 5 already. And Houston? They arrived on Monday night in full-on war paint, four games in, looking like nothing hurt \u2014 nothing like that at all. They looked like they have everything they wanted, and everything they need. Their defensive line features every one of the huge white starmen featured in Prometheus. They have the only running back in the NFL who doesn&amp;#039;t come with a deluxe-sized cranium and a 29-inch inseam. Arian Foster runs like a damned horse, by which I mean he leans into the turns, he has hips, which he uses, and he works to creates distance between himself and the horses trying to get him. When he runs wide, he runs in the open. He&amp;#039;s like Marcus Allen, except bigger. As for Matt Schaub, okay, he reminds me of Billy Kilmer, with his slow-looping rollouts, but he has a giant, All-Pro receiver, held on lockdown by the Jets on Monday night but sure to resurface next week, and he has massive, lumbering tight ends who like to jackhammer the helmets of linebackers who should know better. Their kicker never misses, apparently. And they have the requisite superstar of the defensive backfield.  The Texans looked perfectly comfortable when cutting the Jets to pieces, and maybe only a little too comfortable when the Jets got scrappy and made it close. There was a team already on the other side of Week 5, all ligaments present and accounted for. The Texans, in their Peyton-less division, are rumbling down the other path \u2014 the one where, frankly, things are so good they can only go wrong. Because, face it: No one gets healthier as the season progresses, and injuries don&amp;#039;t pile down. That&amp;#039;s the way you have to see it in the NFL at the end of Week 5 \u2014 the Texans move forward, buoyed by faith that they can build, even as everyone else is torn down, and as for the Jets, it&amp;#039;s fan-blade city.  Next symbolic stop in the NFL season: Week 12, known by Stephen Jackson and statistic-grabbing running backs America over as Play Time: The Beginning of the End. Who knows what paths these two teams will walk then, right? Please. You saw the Texans. They will still be walking, relentlessly. The Jets, one suspects, may still be on their feet, perhaps even walking a path toward the 8-8 wildcard spot. But generally that&amp;#039;s still the one place where everything, every plan and best intention, leads to the exit. MORE NFL WEEK 5 REACTION ON ESQUIRE.COM: Monday Morning Cheerleader on RG3 and ESPN&amp;#039;s Jeff Chadiha on Justin Tuck COME BACK EVERY WEEK FOR THE MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL RECAP WITH TOM CHIARELLA Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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