Don Pierson

As if Tom Coughlin and his freefalling Giants don’t have it bad enough, Eric Mangini and his resurgent Jets are turning up the football heat in New York. Nobody expected the Giants to lose four straight or the Jets to win five of their last seven and nobody can tell which is more surprising.

It wasn’t because Mangini is the NFL’s youngest coach that expectations were low. It was because the Jets were among the worst teams. Or so everybody thought after Herm Edwards left a 4-12 mess at the bottom of the tough AFC East to go to Kansas City.

Along comes Mangini, stuck with a weak-armed quarterback coming off a bad shoulder. The team’s best player, Curtis Martin, doesn’t play because of injury. Mangini switches the defense from a 4-3 to a 3-4 as the season progresses. And lo and behold, the Jets are serious playoff contenders. Real serious.

Currently the sixth seed in the AFC, the Jets are in good position to do more than just hang onto that final playoff spot. They have the easiest schedule down the stretch among all AFC contenders, so they should be able to improve to the No. 5 spot.

Assuming they don’t have time to catch the Patriots in the division, they could still end up playing them in a rubber match this year if the Patriots hold onto the No. 4 seed. That the game would be in New England wouldn’t intimidate, since that’s where the Jets beat them on Nov. 12.

It’s all very heady stuff to contemplate, and Mangini and the Jets claim they haven’t given anything except this week’s upcoming opponent, the Buffalo Bills, any thought.

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“We’re excited about the progress we’re making, but there’s still a quarter of the season left and that’s the way we’re approaching it,” Mangini told reporters this week. “I appreciate the excitement, I appreciate the fans’ excitement — I think that’s great. But if we lose track of the next game and get caught up in the other things that are happening, then that’s when you let a game slip away.”

The one-step-at-a-time approach worked last week, when the Jets scored the first five times they got the ball against the Packers in hallowed Lambeau Field, which Mangini and a few of his wide-eyed players revered. Mangini is not averse to talking about history at all. He routinely prepares his players by showing motivational films of winning athletes. He just doesn’t like to speculate on the future.

Before the Packers’ game, he showed tapes of old boxer Willie Pep from his hometown of Hartford, Ct., as he compared Pep’s iron man career to that of Brett Favre. He showed film of the famous Ice Bowl game. The Jets then made history themselves with a 31-0 halftime lead that left Favre gasping that he’d never seen anything like it.

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What Mangini is doing is improvising on offense and defense in the best tradition of his estranged mentor, Bill Belichick. Without a healthy Martin to run the ball as usual, the Jets have used Kevan Barlow, Leon Washington and Cedric Houston to keep just enough pressure off quarterback Chad Pennington.

Never heard of them? Relax, you’re not alone. Pennington’s favorite receiver remains Laveranues Coles, but guess who has more touchdown catches? Jerricho Cotchery.

The whole thing resembles New England south, which has to drive Belichick slightly nuts. Not only did Belichick fail to endorse the Jets to Mangini, his protégé then had the temerity to meddle in the contract squabble with former Patriots’ receiver Deion Branch. After the Jets made Branch a contract offer, the Patriots were practically forced to unload him to Seattle, a maneuver than soured Belichick on Mangini, and truth be told, probably reminded him of something he might do.

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