05/12 — Former Green & White WR Justin McCareins was heard from out of Music City this morning, and he wasn't singing the blues.

"It feels great. It feels like I never left," McCareins told The City Paper of Nashville after a Sunday OTA practice with the Tennessee Titans. "There's a lot of new faces, but in terms of the coaching staff and Coach [Mike] Heimerdinger being back in the building, it's just a good feeling, a rejuvenated feeling."

McCareins and "Dinger," who was the Jets' OC for that one fateful 2005 season, have been reunited for the first time since JC caught 47 passes for career highs of 813 yards and seven TDs in 2003.

That was the season that prompted the Jets to spend a second-rounder in the 2004 draft to bring McCareins to the Big Apple. And needless to say, McCareins didn't have a spectacular sojourn as a Jet.

I hadn't written about Justin since he was released by the Jets and re-signed by the Titans, so I have several thoughts. One was that I was impressed with him when he first arrived at Weeb Ewbank Hall. We all remembered the 59-yard touchdown catch-run-and-hide over CB Aaron Beasley at the Meadowlands in 2003. At his initial Jets news conference, McCareins mildly boasted of the Titans: "I definitely feel I'm a player they might miss for a while."

I wrote for my then-newspaper at training camp that he reminded me of the taller but athletically similar Richard Jefferson of the NBA Nets, whom I followed and enjoyed watching play, and worked that into the story about how he went 1-on-1 with Michael Jordan — as a seventh-grader at Jordan's summer basketball camp. McCareins took the 1-0 lead on a jumper before Jordan finished him off with two J's and a dunk.

And I was feeling pretty good about my assessment when McCareins contributed 16 starts, 56 catches, 770 yards and four TDs for that 2004 Jets playoff team.

But then things started slip-sliding away. In his four Jets seasons, he did something that is nearly impossible to do. His statistics in three different receiving categories decreased each and every season: receptions (from 56 to 43, 23 and 19), yards (770-713-347-232) and touchdowns (4-2-1-0).

He started his two-year stint under head coach Eric Mangini by failing to complete his initial try at the conditioning run, became a third and fourth WR behind Laveranues Coles and Jerricho Cotchery, had those two drops in the fourth quarter at Baltimore, and finished as the starter for the injured Coles in the '07 finale vs. Kansas City, in which he played 70 plays, had two passes thrown to him and caught none.

Despite the decreasing production, I never felt he was a bad guy, didn't work hard or didn't have pride. Late in the '05 season I asked him about some interesting books in his locker — "Black Hawk Down" and other titles such as "A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior" and "My War".

"I like to read stories that inspire me, either fictionalized accounts or true stories," McCareins said then. "Usually war stories or police stories or anything where the characters display courage, selflessness or sacrifice.

"I wonder if I'd be tough enough to handle the situations I read about. I use it daily, man. I try to use it when I come out to practice and I don't feel like it. 'Am I going to be a baby about it, just go through the motions?' 'It's hot out. Do I feel like working out that long in the summer?' "

He no doubt fell back on his readings when he worked his butt off away from practice to pass that conditioning run in the summer heat of '06, after which he said: "I know when I leave football I'll be able to qualify as a Navy SEAL."

Does all this make McCareins a great pro wideout? Well, no, it probably makes him a guy who needed a change of scenery and will be able to handle the physical and mental parts of the off-season grind to contribute in some way to his original NFL team. In fact, J-Mac has been lining up with the Titans' first offense along with Justin Gage as Roydell Williams sat with an ankle injury.

And after this particular practice, McCareins bypassed a free shot he could've taken at his previous NFL team to offer words of encouragement to his under-fire position mates on his new/old team.

"There's no doubt in my mind," he said, "that we can go out and continue to improve and have a hell of a year as a receiving group."

Call me a sentimental fool, but I hope McCareins and the Titans realize some of those goals — as long as they impersonate real seals trying to play football on Nov. 23. That's, of course, when the Jets come to town.

Jets Hit the OTAs Too

The Jets veterans returned to Hofstra today to participate in their first OTA session of the spring, in the intermittent rains that passed over Long Island. There is nothing to report because there was no media availability at this session. The first OTA media access is Thursday's practice.

Huge Comeback, No Croc

Did everyone see National Geographic Channel's production, "Caught on Safari: Battle at Kruger", on Sunday night? Or the YouTube viral video that spawned it? It was NGC's polished vehicle featuring the eight minutes of digital camcorder footage taken of a miraculous confluence of lions, cape buffalo and crocodile by vacationing oil man Dave Budzinski in South Africa's Kruger National Park in 2004 that hit YouTube last year and as of today has 31,377,771 views and counting.

All I can say as an NFL aficionado is that this comeback by buffalo over the lions is the franchise's greatest since the Bills rebounded from 32 points down to beat the Oilers in the 1992 playoffs.