Can the New York Jets win with Mark Sanchez as their quarterback? That's a question a lot of Jets fans are asking with the team off to a mildly disappointing 5-4 start. Sanchez is getting a lot of the blame. Giving him a larger role in the offensive game plan didn't seem to work early in the season. With the NFL such a passing-driven league right now, with teams generally needing star quarterbacks such as Aaron Rodgers and Tom Brady to win the Super Bowl, Jets fans are wondering if Sanchez is really a guy they can win with. Try to picture Sanchez in your mind. Perhaps you are picturing his playoff heroics from the past two postseasons. More likely, a lot of fans are picturing Sanchez throwing the ball to a guy from the other team, maybe the end zone pick he threw against the Buffalo Bills a couple of weeks ago. With that vision in your mind, you probably think that Sanchez must be near the bottom of the league in nearly every statistical category. But that's not the case. Sanchez definitely has accuracy issues. This past offseason, Football Outsiders wrote numerous times about Sanchez leading the league in dropped interceptions in 2010 and how this presaged a rise in his interception rate for 2011. That's exactly what has happened; after 13 picks a year ago, he's on pace for 16 this year. His interception rate of 3.1 percent is 24th in the league among quarterbacks with at least 100 passes, and his completion rate of 57.5 percent ranks 28th. Yet overall, Sanchez is not terrible. He has an 81.5 passer rating, which is 18th among all quarterbacks with at least 100 passes. In Football Outsiders' DVOA ratings (explained here), he's at 2.6 percent, which also ranks 18th. He's near the middle of the league in these other stats as well: • Touchdown rate: 4.7 percent, ranks 12th • Net yards per attempt: 6.3, ranks 16th • Adjusted sack rate: 7.2 percent, ranks 19th. By DVOA, Sanchez has been better this year than Josh Freeman, Jay Cutler and Sam Bradford. One reason: He's been particularly good in the red zone, ranking sixth in DVOA among quarterbacks once he gets past the 20. Why do Sanchez's numbers not line up with our mental image of his play? Many fans live in a strange NFL Lake Wobegon where there are no average quarterbacks. Our minds tend to place passers in one of two categories: "elite" and "terrible." We have a hard time considering that some quarterbacks are going to be a little above average, or a little below average, rather than at the extremes. Sanchez is a prime example of this problem. When he plays well in the playoffs, some fans insist he's a winner whose regular-season struggles can be ignored. When he has a bad game in the regular season, other fans come out and declare that the Jets will never win with Sanchez running the offense. Very few fans seem to be able to accept the truth: Mark Sanchez is a slightly below-average quarterback who still hasn't necessarily reached his potential. The last part of that sentence is an important part of the Sanchez story. He's not a good quarterback yet, but Sanchez is progressing instead of stagnating. His completion rate, touchdown rate, net yards per attempt and NFL passer rating are all higher than a year ago. And there's reason to believe that more improvement is likely in 2012. A few years ago, when Football Outsiders first created our Lewin Career Forecast for projecting college quarterbacks into the pros, we also looked at what to expect from the career progression of an average NFL quarterback. It turns out that on average, NFL quarterbacks see the biggest efficiency improvements before their second and fourth seasons. (You'll find this essay in our book "Pro Football Prospectus 2006.") Sanchez certainly saw improvement between Season 1 and Season 2. That Season 4 improvement is not a guarantee -- Matt Ryan and Joe Flacco are prime examples this year -- but it's still a good reason to give Sanchez one more season before kicking him to the curb. Another interesting way to guess at Sanchez's future is to look at quarterbacks who were similar to him during a three-year span. We took Sanchez's 2011 season and prorated it to 16 games, then compared his first three years to other quarterbacks since 1978 using the Football Outsiders similarity scores system. The 10 most similar spans belong to: • John Elway:1984-1986 • Joe Flacco: 2008-2010 • Tom Brady: 2001-2003 • Jeff Blake: 1994-1996 • Jason Campbell: 2007-2009 • Jake Plummer: 1999-2001 • Eli Manning: 2005-2007 • Brett Favre: 1992-1994 • Doug Williams: 1979-1981 • Trent Dilfer: 1995-1997 That group is a mixed bag, to say the least. Remember that similar doesn't necessarily mean equal -- Favre's 1992-1994 seasons had numbers that had comparable "shape" but were definitely superior. Still, take a look specifically at two of these quarterbacks who were particularly similar to Sanchez in the third season in that span: How Sanchez stacks up Comparing Mark Sanchez with two all-time greats at a similar age Player Year Team Age Comp Att PassYD TD INT COMP% Yd/At Yd/C Mark Sanchez 2011* NYJ 25 300 530 3700 25 16 56.7% 6.98 12.31 John Elway 1986 DEN 26 280 504 3485 19 13 55.6% 6.91 12.45 Tom Brady 2003 NE 26 317 528 3620 23 12 60.0% 6.86 11.42 Yes, we do need to consider that the offensive environment has changed during the last 20 years, and John Elway's 56 percent completion rate in 1986 was a lot more acceptable than Sanchez's 57 percent now. Still, these are two quarterbacks who were on their way to developing into NFL MVPs, and they weren't that much better than Sanchez when they were roughly the same age. Put all these numbers together and the picture shows that Sanchez isn't a terrible quarterback. He's just not a good one yet. The Jets probably should give him another year and a half to see if he can develop into something closer to what they expected when they drafted him fifth overall. If he still qualifies as "slightly below average" after four years, then it's time to go out and look for a new quarterback of the future. But two and a half years is not enough time to give up on a player who is not as awful as many fans seem to believe. http://insider.espn.go.com/nfl/stor...show-too-early-define-mark-sanchez-career-nfl
As well constructed and fact-based as this is, it will still be dismissed by those who just don't like Sanchez. I enjoyed reading it though.
Why would I dismiss it? I don't accept below average from a 5th overall pick. If he was a 3rd or 4th rounder I would be more content with his play. We're going to look back at this handful of years as a missed opportunity because we didn't have a great quarterback at the helm.
It was a good article. FYI, it was already posted here: http://forums.theganggreen.com/showthread.php?t=69077
Nothing like cherry picking the negative to make your reading comprehension skills look like dog crap. I know every first round pick should be kicking ass and taking names with no run game a shit offensive line etc. Seriously do you believe your complete and utter bullshit or just troll for the fuck if it? You just dismiss a fair and balanced article to "I don't like Sanchez he no lead league after 2 and 1half years" bravo!
It's ok. The better reason to point out that it's a repost is that it was written prior to last night's game.
All I did was quote pieces of the post that were pertinent to my point. You can read into the FBO post and cherry pick all of the false optimism if you want. The offensive line was not bad for all 4 quarters. They were terrible in a couple spots but overall they played good enough to win. You can't expect Sanchez to go through a game not getting hit or sacked at all, especially with Dumervil and Miller on the line. The offensive line was the perfect scapegoat when at that point we were already shitting the bed.
So your position is that Sanchez has to be perfect all game for the Jets to win but it is ok for the offensive line to be absolute shit half the time when he drops back to pass? Because he can magically do something wonderful to cover up the fact that he's surrounded by linebackers two seconds into the play? Really?
