NFL Betting – Is Mark Sanchez Ready for Primetime?

Mark Sanchez may fashion himself something of a matinee idol, and a reality star like the rest of the Jets, but as a quarterback, he isn’t really ready for prime time. After 74 yards passing and converting one third down in a game that was winnable, Sanchez, I will guarantee, is starting to rise a lot of doubts among NFL bettors who thought he might have been ready to make some giant (oops, pardon the awful pun) strides. This Jet offense is missing an engine or two, and no matter how good the mechanics are, you’ve got to look at the pilot for the fight guidance (okay, there’s a metaphor for you).

The reviews on the 2010 season premiere (where the Jets lost as 1.5-point NFL betting favorites) are in from the all-important (I kid, I kid) New York press. Gary Myers, the columnist for the New York Daily News, wrote: "He was such a non-threat that by the second half the Ravens were playing so many men in the box it almost looked like nobody was in the secondary." That is pathetic but true. Steve Politi, writing for the Newark Star-Ledger, said that "The Jets offense was not just a little bit bad in this humbling 10-9 loss to Baltimore last night. It was bring-in-Brooks-Bollinger bad. It was get-nine-yards-on-fourth-and-10 bad."

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Somebody named Thomas Alter, writing for the Huffington Post, commented that "I really don’t care how he has the ‘personality’ for New York. The Jets will never win a Super Bowl with Mark Sanchez. In fact, he may be the worst starting quarterback in the NFL." He calls for the benching of Sanchez. Well, benching someone like, say, Trent Edwards in Buffalo may be realistic, and even reasonable. But I don’t really dwell on things that aren’t going to happen. Rex Ryan and the Jets would not have handed the job over to Sanchez without much of a competition in his rookie season if they were going to consider pulling out the rug from under him right now.

NFL bettors who were listening closely during HBO’s "Hard Knocks" heard Kellen Clemens, the third-stringer who was being coerced into signing for the veteran minimum or be cut, lament that "I want one more fair opportunity to have a legit competition with some other quarterback for the starting job." Well, the point here isn’t that Clemens could have won the job on his own merit, but since we can assume he isn’t talking about this year’s camp, we can safely conclude that he’s talking about the process by which he was rather automatically relegated to the #2 spot on the depth chart last season. That kind of inheritance is sort of like handing the team over to Woody Johnson’s son. Come to think of it, it’s not unlike the story of Woody Johnson himself, is it?

Ryan comes from the culture in Baltimore, where they were conservative with their offense to begin with and extra careful with Joe Flacco as a rookie. In his rookie season as a head coach, no one ran more of a low-risk offense than Rex Ryan; his team ran it more than anybody. Still, with those safeguards, Sanchez tossed 20 interceptions, and only one quarterback in the league, Jay Cutler, threw more into enemy hands. Put that in its proper perspective, and when I say that, understand how bad that makes Sanchez look.

What I have seen from the guy (and I trust what some NFL bettors saw as well) is a lot of that "look at me" celebrity stuff that contributed to the downfall of another USC quarterback, Matt Leinart. I don’t know how much patience Ryan and his offensive coordinator, Brian Schottenheimer, have in the guy, but you couldn’t blame them, or any member of the Jets, if they were saying something along the lines of having a Ferrari in the garage but with a 13-year-old kid driving it. That is to say, it’s not going to win a race, and may just wind up getting in a terrible accident.

I know that’s another metaphor, but I think it’s one you can comprehend completely.

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