First of all, since you dropped the argument that deep passes over the middle are not more risky, I will assume you concede they are. The question of numbers of bad passes is debatable, but what is not is the sheer stupidity Sanchez showed by throwing that INT, throwing it WHEN he did, WHERE ON THE FIELD he did, into the coverage he did. Your attempts to obfuscate what the issue was, as pointed out by the OP and others here, failed. In any event, it was hardly his only bad pass of the day, only the most stupid. Your argument that throwing an INT when already in field goal range is inconsequential is mindboggling on its face, but does not hold up. Due to the INT, the Jets lost possession on the Oakland 24. After the ensuing Oakland possession, the Jets took possession on their own 21. Sure, they went on to score on that drive. But are we to suppose the Jets would NOT have scored on that later drive if they had scored on the drive Sanchez threw the INT on? That makes no sense whatsoever. They also had to cover that loss of field position yardage of 57 yards. How many times do you have to do over covering 57 yards before it comes back to bite you? The Jet D in fact stopped Oakland after their first TD drive forcing three and outs on the next three possessions. Very good, but that couldn't hold up forever. In fact on the next drive Oakland went from their 13 to the Jet 38, where Janikowski missed a 59 yard FG attempt. While the Jets responded with a drive of their own, but despite the excellent field position of their 46 yard line, they only got three points out of it. Then all hell broke loose, and Oakland scored ten to tie it before the half. How you can say the INT had no effect is beyond me. As I said there was no reason to think the Jets would not have scored the ten points that followed the INT, or let me put it this way, there's no more reason to suppose that than that the Raiders would have played equally aggressively on their side of the ball if there had been no INT. And if the Jets had scored those ten in addition to the FG and probably TD they would have scored but for the INT, they would have been up at the half insted of tied. But if that's what an apologist for a crap INT has to think to come up with a rose colored view of it, well, I am not wearing those. And don't agree with your take on it. As otehrs have pointed out, no one is saying that single INT was the reason the Jets lost. But it was a terrible mental mistake and it did cost them, factoring into the loss.
I think the OP's intention with this thread was to point out that Sanchez is still making mistakes that have been characteristic of his career. Of course Brady and Manning and Rodgers and Brees will "still make dumb decisions" even 5 or 8 or 20 years into their careers. However, it is pretty hard to get too worked up about those intermittent mistakes when they all have years of consistent, smart QB play that have been (relatively) mistake-free. Sanchez had a good start to 2010, going 5 games with no interceptions. Other than that, however, interceptions and mistakes could be described as being characteristic of the way he plays. If this was a trend that Sanchez were steadily improving upon (i.e. moving away from) it would be hard to explain the fact that he has thrown 18 interceptions over the past 17 games (including playoffs), only having thrown 20 TDs over that same span of time. And there has been only ONE point during that time where he has gone two consecutive games without throwing a pick. I think that the OP would agree that this thread is about improvement (or lack thereof?) in this area, not being perfect or matching Tom Brady's stats.
