For ex-Steeler Holmes, it's not personal - yet

FLORHAM PARK, N.J. - Santonio Holmes said it's not personal. Not yet, anyway.

On Sunday in Pittsburgh, the place Holmes called home for the first four seasons of his career, where he blossomed as a big-game player, the receiver just wants to win another trip to the Super Bowl, he said, this time with the New York Jets.

After that, though, it's a different story for him and the team that dealt him away in April.

"If we win the Super Bowl, then everything is personal. That's a slap back in those guys' face for trading me," Holmes said Wednesday, wearing the green and white of his new team.

Holmes, 26, at first played down the revenge factor against the Steelers. But the Jets took a risk on Holmes and fellow wide receiver Braylon Edwards for games such as these.

"Big-time players make big-time plays in the brightest spotlight, and here it is right here," Jets coach Rex Ryan said. "The AFC championship time - this is 'Tone time."

On a team known best for its big-mouth coach, tough defense, star quarterback, and running attack, the receivers might fade to the background - were it not for the big names and checkered reputations of Holmes and Edwards.

Both were first-round picks and have had star turns. But both were had cheap after wearing out their welcomes in their original homes. Holmes arrived in North Jersey with a four-game suspension for violating the NFL's substance-abuse policy. The Steelers were so eager to unload him they accepted only a fifth-round pick.

"All you can do is keep replenishing your career," Holmes said. "If you get an opportunity to move somewhere else, don't give up on yourself because someone else did, and that's exactly what I didn't do."

Together in New Jersey, Holmes and Edwards, along with veteran wide receiver Jerricho Cotchery, have dubbed themselves the Flight Boys. When Holmes met the media Wednesday, he wore a white, long-sleeve T-shirt bearing the nickname - with an exclamation point - and their numbers: 10, 17, 89.

"We have playmakers," Holmes said. "We wanted to build something among ourselves so that neither one of us felt like we're being left out."

On a team that ranked fourth in the NFL in rushing and 22d in passing, the Jet with the most receptions has been tight end Dustin Keller. But the wide receivers have been a huge part of the Jets' postseason run.

Edwards made a leaping catch that set up the Jets' winning field goal in their first playoff game, and he scored a second-quarter touchdown against the Patriots on Sunday. In the fourth quarter, moments after the Patriots had closed to within three points, Cotchery made a 58-yard run and catch to put the Jets back in scoring position. Three plays later, Holmes hauled in an acrobatic touchdown, planting his knee and toe in the corner of the end zone.

It was reminiscent of the game in which Holmes made his mark as a star, Super Bowl XLIII, when he capped a 131-yard day with a toe-drag touchdown with less than a minute remaining. With that play, he clinched the game's MVP award and helped the Steelers win their sixth Super Bowl.

Now Holmes hopes to stop Pittsburgh from winning a seventh and bring a second to the Jets. They might need him: The Steelers ranked first in the NFL in stopping the run.

The teams met Dec. 19, and though the Jets won, Holmes was quiet: six catches for just 40 yards. The biggest wide-receiver contribution came instead from Brad Smith, who returned the opening kickoff 97 yards for a touchdown. Holmes said Smith, who makes his mark mostly on special teams and in the Jets' version of the Wildcat, is the Flight Boys' "secret-service guy."

"We don't talk about him very much because he does his dirty work elsewhere," Holmes said. "But he knows he's a part of our group."