A team game
To quote the great poet Michael Lawrence Tyler, better known as Mystikal….SHOW ME WHAT YA WORKIN’ WITH! Ok so perhaps Mystikal wasn’t great, he was subpar at best. And perhaps he was more of a rap artist than a poet, but really would he not have been incredible as a poet?!
So you may ask why I would do a piece on Mystikal. Well I’m not…IDIOT! It’s on Mark Sanchez. But what the great….good….solid….average…..run of the mill rapper Mystikal said rings true with Sanchez. All season Sanchez has been killed by the New York media, the national media, hell even the Canadian media has taken shots at him!
This is a guy in his 4th season, that has quarterbacked his team to 2 AFC championship games in those 4 seasons, yet everyone thinks he is now awful and he deserves most of the blame for the Jets problems. Huh?! Has anyone decided to look at what the Jets have put around him?! Who is he even throwing to?!? He is supposed to be relying on that amazing running game led by Shonn Greene?! The offensive c0-0rdinator is Tony Sparano, who is all about the run and has zero offensive creativity when it comes to the passing game. He likes to run the wildcat….how is that beneficial to Sanchez?!
Fans have done a complete 180 in the last 20 years. It used to be if someone had great stats that it wasn’t his fault if a team didn’t have success, because that player had great stats so how could it be his fault? But by last season things had completely shifted the other way when Tim Tebow went on his run of terrible play bailed out by a good running game and an amazing defense. The Broncos were winning and there were people who were saying he should get MVP consideration based solely on his record. The answer as usual lay’s somewhere in the middle.
It’s amazing with Sanchez, because when they went to those AFC championship games everyone was anointing him as the next big time QB in the NFL. He was solid, especially for a kid in his 1st and 2nd season. But he wasn’t THE reason they were there. Both seasons they had a great running game and a great defense. Now he has neither, nor does he have receivers and he is terrible. He’s not terrible. That defense lost perhaps the best defensive player in the NFL, and the offense lost their number 1 wide out. Yet nobody talks about that, they just want to pin loses on Sanchez.
Did anyone care to watch Greg McElroy on Sunday or did everyone just look at the fact he won and that was good enough? Let me first say I’m a McElroy fan, I watched him a lot at Alabama and thought he was a flat out steal in the 6th round of the 2011 draft. But he didn’t do anything great on that opening drive. They got the run game going, and it was with Bilal Powell, not Shonn Greene. He was ok, but it wasn’t something Sanchez couldn’t have done himself. Also, they don’t win that game if Arizona doesn’t have even worse quarterbacking than the Jets do.
All of this isn’t to suggest that Sanchez will become a franchise QB. But I highly doubt he is garbage, he just simply has nothing to work with and that franchise is a total mess right now. To steal a phrase from Colin Cowherd, I’m buying Mark Sanchez stock right now. With a functional organization, and actual weapons to work with I believe Sanchez would be at least as good as Joe Flacco if not better. If you put Sanchez at quarterback for the Arizona Cardinals with Fitzgerald and Malcom Floyd to work with along with a great defense and great coaching staff he would be just fine.
Trent Dilfer is now a great analyst on ESPN and prior to the 2009 draft he was extremely high on Sanchez. To give you an idea of how good of a quarterback evaluator Dilfer is, he said Andy Dalton was the best QB available going into the 2011 draft. Dalton went in the 2nd round, the 5th QB taken. As of right now, Dalton looks like the best QB to come out of that draft class and I don’t think it is even close right now. Now of course Dilfer could have been wrong on Sanchez, but he is rarely wrong when it comes to quarterbacks, and most people were sky high on Sanchez. Now they’ve all broke their legs jumping off the band wagon.
Unfortunately for Sanchez it looks as though it isn’t going to get better anytime soon in NY. He has lost his confidence. I doubt Tebow will be back, but he will now have the fans clammoring for Greg McElroy. Be smarter than a fan that just sits there and says “he’s not winning, he sucks”. Football is a team game, and no matter who is at QB for the Jets these days they simply have nothing around them to help. This team has erroaded in the last 2 seasons, but little of that is on Mark Sanchez.
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