10/08 — Safety Eric Smith will sit out Sunday's game against Cincinnati for his one-game NFL suspension, Jets head coach Eric Mangini confirmed today at his news conference.

"Yes, his suspension was upheld and his fine was upheld, so he will be out this week," said Mangini, referring to the league's penalty for Smith's last-minute hit on Cardinals WR Anquan Boldin two Sundays ago. "We had plans in place, things we worked on from when we first learned about that, so we'll just proceed along that path."

Asked what those plans are, the coach deadpanned: "Somebody else playing safety." But Mangini knew what the questioner meant. "Well, we've got David Barrett, we've got Hank [Poteat], we've got Abe [Elam]. Any of those three guys could be there. Dwight Lowery."

Lowery, eh? The rookie from San Jose State has had plenty of highs — not to mention his share of attention from opposing QBs and offensive coordinators — as the four-game starter at right cornerback. Now he's got some safety responsibility? He's quite the fourth-rounder.

"We rotate those guys through," Mangini explained. "What we want be able to do is to change who's down and who's back. And one of the things that's really important to me, especially in the secondary, is that they all understand each other's roles.

"You may run some corner-over type of defense against slot, where they have both receivers on the same side, and you want to be able to transition the inside corner to a safety's role to do something else on the backside or for disguise purposes, and if they just get into the pattern of knowing, 'OK, this is what I do at corner,' it really limits your flexibility."

The same thing holds true for the DBs in the different sub packages.

"Now you want to change things you're doing, swap guys or play match coverages. It's so much harder if you start from "Just focus on this one job." Then you get to whatever week it is, you want to switch guys around — it's a significant amount of learning. We try to do it in chunks and build."

The secondary is of primary importance this week because among the challenges the Bengals will present are how to contain Carson Palmer's passes to Chad "Ocho Cinco" Johnson (the Bengals are listing his last name as Ocho Cinco but he's still wearing JOHNSON on his game jersey), T.J. Houshmandzadeh, just returned Chris Henry and even Glenn Holt, who has no receptions this season but had a career-high 54 yards on four catches in the Jets' 38-31 loss to the Bengals last year.

"It doesn't matter what's on the back of his jersey, he can make some big plays," Mangini said. "He's usually open."

The Week Ahead

The next several days ahead before the Bengals came will be packed with features for visitors to newyorkjets.com, and at the top of the list for me is Marty Lyons, the Jets' radio analyst and former card-carrying member of the Sack Exchange, making his blog debut in our expanded Radar blogosphere.

Marty will be putting his spin on the Jets after each quarter of the season, so with the team having just passed the quarter pole and heading toward the back stretch, his first review will go up under the Radar banner first thing Thursday morning.

Eric Allen spent a full day Tuesday at Joe Namath's annual golf outing on Long Island gathering info and schmoozing Joe and the ex-players. EA's reporting will find a home in our game-by-game reminiscence of the 1968 season that will begin in a week and a half leading up to the 40th anniversary celebration of Super Bowl III during the Jets-Chiefs game on Oct. 26.

And Eric has a blog on his time spent with those Green & White stars of yore that will go up this afternoon.

Tim Carlson was at the NFL Hometown Huddle program along with James Dearth and the Jets rookie class that provided renovations to Beechcrest Park in the team's new home of Florham Park, N.J. Tim's report will be available Thursday morning.

From camp today, I'll have Brett Favre and Eric Mangini talking with reporters about the work that Favre, his fellow QBs and the Jets' wide receivers continue to do on and off the field and in particular in the offensive meeting room as they watch video and thrash out communications, coverage and route-running issues.

As for this week's radio shows, Shaun Ellis will be Tony Richardson's and Eric Allen's guest on "Paving the Way with T-Rich," which hits the Multimedia page Thursday afternoon, and EA and I will be joined by Boomer Esiason of CBS, who after all is the former Jets and Bengals QB, and by owner Woody Johnson on the auction of Coaches Club seats in the New Jets Stadium on our "Jets Two-Minute Drive," which goes live on Friday afternoon.

Man, I'm tired just thinking about this content.