When the Jets open their season Sept. 8 at MetLife Stadium, Revis will be present — but as a member of the visiting team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who acquired him in a deal that started steaming toward inevitability a few weeks after Revis affirmed his allegiance to the Jets.  All of the denials, no-comments and public posturing that cloaked these trade talks gave way Sunday to what was an unequivocal precursor of Revis’s departure. After being granted permission by the Jets, he flew on a private jet to Florida to have a physical exam.  The Jets would not have allowed Revis to fly to Tampa to have his surgically repaired left knee evaluated had the teams not already agreed on compensation — the 13th overall pick in this year’s draft and what will probably be Tampa Bay’s third-round pick in 2014 — and had Revis’s representatives not made substantial progress toward a new deal.  Late Sunday afternoon, Revis signed the long-term contract (six years, $96 million) that he desired, a wish that was not granted by the Jets and their owner, Woody Johnson.  Johnson denied that his team was rebuilding.  “There has never been a year when I haven’t tried to win using everything I have to try to build the team — this year is no different,” he said. “We are committed to putting a team on the field that is a winning team and doing it in a deliberate and sound way.”  The trade signifies the biggest personnel decision made by the Jets’ new general manager, John Idzik, who has the job of improving a roster that, after consecutive appearances in the A.F.C. championship game, lapsed into disrepair because of a series of meager drafts, onerous contracts and poor decisions. Partly as a result, he was left with little choice but to ship away Revis, one of the best players in franchise history.  “Darrelle had a desire to remain with the Jets for his career,” Idzik said. “We shared that desire. However, it is not as simple as player wanting club and club wanting player.”  He added, “We feel like trading Darrelle, although it is very hard to do, this is the best thing for all concerned.”  As long as a trade helped the Jets over the long term, Idzik was amenable, he said. It will take a few years to judge whether Sunday’s move positioned the team for sustainable success. Idzik is under immense pressure to maximize his return, and how he proceeds with the Nos. 9 and 13 picks Thursday will shape not only his tenure but also the course of the franchise.  The immediate future, though, is daunting, which does not portend well for Coach Rex Ryan. Ryan has lost one of his most indispensable players — he once called Revis one of the top three cornerbacks in N.F.L. history — and his job could be in jeopardy if the Jets miss the playoffs for a third straight season.  Had it been solely Ryan’s decision, the Jets would have showered Revis with money — even with Revis’s coming off reconstructive knee surgery — because of his importance to their aggressive defensive scheme. By matching up each week against the opponent’s top receiver in man-to-man coverage, Revis essentially eliminated a vast portion of the field, allowing Ryan to deploy other defenders in creative ways.  The Jets were under no obligation to trade Revis, who turns 28 in July and was under contract for the 2013 season, at a reasonable salary. But retaining Revis at the salary he craved — on par with those of the league’s top quarterbacks — would have been a luxury for a team with so many other areas of need.  “It became quite evident to us,” Idzik said, “that there was a substantial difference between Darrelle’s view of his value and ours.”  It was hardly an enviable position for Idzik, but the resolution itself was unavoidable. The situation had gripped the Jets since reports surfaced Jan. 24, the day Idzik was introduced, that Johnson, unwilling to meet Revis’s contract demands, would explore a trade. At the time, he neither confirmed nor denied that possibility.  That afternoon, Revis took to Twitter to say he was “speechless” at not being notified, and so began yet another instance of contract tension. It had simmered for years, since long before the most recent episode, when the Jets insisted that Revis report on April 15 to their off-season program instead of continuing to rehabilitate his knee in Arizona.  The Jets traded up to select Revis with the 14th pick in 2007 and then engaged in contentious negotiations with his representatives that spurred a 20-day holdout that summer. In 2010, he missed more than five weeks of training camp before agreeing to a four-year, $46 million deal that was heavily front-loaded. Last summer, Revis considered staging a third holdout to protest being paid what he considered less than market value.  A clause in that so-called Band-Aid contract ushered the Jets to this precipice. The Jets would have been prevented from using the franchise tag on him after this season and would have received only a compensatory draft pick had Revis left as an unrestricted free agent.  The Jets said they were not actively seeking to trade Revis, but that was semantics. The Buccaneers, who needed to bolster their secondary and whose general manager, Mark Dominik, worked for nearly a decade with Idzik in Tampa Bay’s front office, emerged as the perfect fit.  That is how it came to pass that Revis’s business manager, John Geiger, on Sunday posted a photograph on Instagram of Revis wearing a Buccaneers cap and a T-shirt that said, “Sui Generis.” For six years, Revis was one of a kind for the Jets. And now, despite what he may have wanted four months ago, he will be one of a kind somewhere else.
The Buccaneers acquired the Jetsâ All-Pro cornerback, Darrelle Revis, who agreed to terms with Tampa Bay on a new long-term contract, for six years and $96 million.