09/06 — They're clichés because they're true. And Eric Mangini used one of those football-type clichés to explain what makes it so difficult to prepare for the Patriots from one game to the next.

"With New England, each game plan is specific to the opponent, specific to that point in time," the Jets head coach said today of the Green & White's opening-day date with the Patriots. "Where with other teams the consistency might be in their approach week in and week out, the thing that's consistent with this opponent is change."

Said TE Chris Baker about the changeable Patriots: "You don't get a different team. You get a different scheme."

Mangini went into a little detail about how a team such as Bill Belichick's Patriots or Mike Shanahan's Broncos reinvent themselves from one meeting to the next, one week to the next.

"It could be more pressure one game, the type of pressure, the front you're facing, 4-3 vs. 3-4. It could be a 3-4 building a 4-3," he said. "It could be the approach of the offense, whether it's going to be more quick passes, more max protection, more screens. There's a lot of different things an opponent can do each outing, and you've just got to see what it's going to be."

Which is one reason Mangini and his staff stress intelligence as one of their core Jet values: so their team can prevail in this chess match that breaks out every time these AFC East rivals play.

"It's great. It's why you spend so much time during the off-season building flexibility into the system, why philosophically when we draft players or bring players in, we want them to be smart and able to adjust quickly to what you haven't prepared for," the coach said. "Every opponent gives you whatever they want, then you have to be able to see those things and determine how you're going to respond."

The locker room was a little more muted today than Wednesday (even though Steve Serby returned), with good media crowds surrounding Baker, then CBs Darrelle Revis and Hank Poteat, among others. Poteat was sought out because in a two-month span last season he went from the Patriots to the Jets to the Pats to the Jets.

"Both coaches are smart coaches who are always working on different situations that might come up in a game," Poteat said when asked about his heads-up defense on a fake-spike play in last year's regular-season game at New England. "That play was the kind of thing that pretty much came up every day at practice. You can't take a play off."

Asked if he figured a Patriots uniform is somewhere in his future, just because of the way his recent past has gone, he replied: "I haven't thought about that. ... I'm just excited to be playing for the Jets this weekend."