FOXBOROUGH, Mass. (AP) – The Patriots’ path to the title in the mediocre AFC East may not be so smooth after all.

Beat the second-place Jets on Sunday and New England leads New York by three games. Lose and the lead shrinks to just one.

Unlikely? Perhaps.

Preseason favorites to win the division, the Patriots are 4-0 against AFC East teams, beat the Jets in New York 24-17 and led them by 21/2 games after playing just seven. But New England is the only team in the division that was beaten last weekend.

“That’s the funny part of this business. You win all these games and it really won’t mean too much if you lose this one,” Patriots fullback Heath Evans said. “Look at the Dolphins and Chicago. How many picked that game?”

Miami, in last place in the AFC East, handed the Bears their first loss of the season, 31-13, last Sunday. That night, Indianapolis beat New England 27-20 as Tom Brady threw four interceptions at home. Both Patriots losses have been at Gillette Stadium, where they face New York.

The Jets (4-4) had last weekend off. Now they can give the Patriots (6-2) their first two-game losing streak since December 2002. They did it then, too, with a 30-17 win one week after New England lost to Tennessee.

“We have a kind of renewed feeling” after the bye, said Jets linebacker Matt Chatham, who played the last six seasons for the Patriots. “It’s kind of a two-month race now.”

New England’s 57-game stretch without consecutive losses is the second longest since the NFL-AFL merger in 1970, three behind San Francisco’s run from Nov. 12, 1995 to Oct. 17, 1999.

“The consistency we’ve played with has been pretty good over the years,” Brady said. “It doesn’t have a whole lot of bearing on this week, unfortunately.”

Under Eric Mangini, the Patriots defensive coordinator last year, the Jets already have matched their victory total for all last season. But they’ve lost their last seven games against the Patriots.

“It’s a measuring stick,” Chatham said. “When you continuously lose to the measuring stick, I think that’s what gets you a little downtrodden.”

A victory Sunday would change that mood considerably, yet New York’s players don’t want to get so excited that it affects their play.

“We’re not going to go out there as we haven’t done in any game and make it out to be the Super Bowl,” linebacker Jonathan Vilma said.

The Patriots have another chance to unleash their powerful running tandem of Corey Dillon and rookie Laurence Maroney.

Their ground game gained 148 yards against Indianapolis, which had the NFL’s worst rushing defense. Only one team has allowed more total yards than the Jets and only two have given up more by running.

“It’s the same defense that we play here,” Brady said. “In a sense, you know the vulnerabilities of it. Now on the other side of the ball, Eric kind of knows what we’re all about as well.”

Like most teams, the Patriots had trouble against Peyton Manning last Sunday. But in their second game of the season, they also gave up two long touchdown passes by Jets quarterback Chad Pennington – a 71-yarder to Jerricho Cotchery and a 46-yarder to Laveranues Coles after New England had taken a 24-0 lead.

“They just kept playing and playing and made some big plays,” Patriots linebacker Tedy Bruschi said, “and all of a sudden it’s a ball game.”

The Patriots could be missing both starting safeties. Rodney Harrison is out with a broken shoulder blade and Eugene Wilson is questionable after missing four of the last five games with a hamstring injury. For the Jets, Coles is questionable with a calf injury.

The Jets struggled in their last game, a 20-13 loss at Cleveland. Officials ruled that tight end Chris Baker was out of bounds rather than in the end zone on a fourth-down catch late in the game. Baker caught the ball with one hand and landed out of bounds when he was hit by defensive back Brodney Pool. Had the Jets won, they’d be trailing the Patriots by just one game.

“What you try to do is look at the game as a whole and see what you could have done differently not to have the game come down to one specific call,” Pennington said. “At the same time, when it does do that it is a little bit frustrating.”

Pennington played poorly in that game, just as Brady did against the Colts. But both rarely play two bad games in a row.

“There’s a lot that this team can learn form that team in terms of coming back and being resilient,” Brady said.

And vice versa.

“One of the hardest things to do as a professional athlete is to be able to take a bad performance and learn from it and then erase it from your memory,” Pennington said. Brady “is probably the best in the business when it comes to that aspect.”