This has to be the end of Mark Sanchez.
While the so-called butt-fumble will be the first clip of his career retrospective, the five turnovers against the Titans in Monday's 14-10 loss will come up before the first commercial break. An awful team beat the Jets because Sanchez kept giving them the ball and there couldn't be a more fitting end point than the botched snap on the game's final play, something so simple that high schoolers can do it but something too hard for the Jets.
The Jets have given Sanchez every opportunity to succeed and acted to bolster his confidence at every turn over the last two years and Sanchez has failed to produce every single time. Rex Ryan will have zero credibility left if he actually sends Sanchez back out there again.
Could they have done more to help him? Absolutely, but you can't build around a quarterback who's average with good pieces around him and horrible when the supporting cast is lacking.
And lacking is relative. This team is 6-8 despite playing without Santonio Holmes or Darrelle Revis for most of the season and you can't help but wonder if they wouldn't be 8-6 with league average play at quarterback.
Even with Sanchez, what would their record be if they had a player of some value drafted with the fourth round pick they spent on Tebow? That's the other half of this nightmare.
Tebow finally got his series on Monday and it couldn't have been handled with more of the trademark Jets finesse. Tebow came in for one series, had one good run and then saw the drive fizzle after a delay of game penalty on third down caused by the Jets' inability to call plays for Tebow.
Listing all the problems with this would take forever, but let's focus on the fact that the Jets went to Tebow for that series and then never put him in for an extended period again even though their starting quarterback was in the process of throwing four interceptions. He played one more snap, coming into the game after two straight Sanchez completions so that the Jets could make it clear that Tony Sparano knows even less about offense than Ryan.
The Jets didn't even bother trying to explain it after the game, which at least respects the fan base enough to not make it seem like there's rhyme or reason to anything they do offensively. The Sanchez/Tebow thing is like choosing to take the same route to work every day even though you know there's a tremendous amount of traffic waiting for you and that an alternate route exists.
Maybe there's traffic on that other route and maybe it's worse than the traffic on the original route, but you never know until you give it a shot. Figuring out the rationale behind these offensive decisions would tax a million think tanks for a million days. There will probably be a change made now, but the fact that the Jets wouldn't go to Tebow with their chances at the playoffs on the line says all that needs to be said about how misguided the whole idea of trading for him was in the first place.
It's as ugly a mess as the Jets have ever known, which is saying something given the number of ugly messes in Jets history. Here's the rest of the good, bad and ugly from Monday night.
GOOD: Calvin Pace finally snapped and said what plenty of Jets players must have wanted to say all season when he expressed the disgust he felt trying to win games that Sanchez gives away. Ryan has to hold Sanchez accountable or he'll lose the team, which is a place we should have gotten to months ago.
BAD: The Jets defense isn't the problem right now, but they did contribute a big piece to the losing puzzle. Letting Chris Johnson run 94 yards for a touchdown on a play when the Jets had more defenders in the box than the Titans had blockers is almost as inexcusable as anything Sanchez did on Monday.
GOOD and UGLY: Braylon Edwards actually looked fairly decent in his first game with the Jets, which should make you feel good. It doesn't, though, because the Jets offense is sad enough that he was their No. 1 receiver days after getting claimed off waivers from a good Seattle team that had zero interest in his services.
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BAD: Whenever the Jets are done finding a different quarterback, they need to get to work on the rest of the offense. Pick a position, any position, and just go from there in an attempt to upgrade one of the least talented units in recent memory.
UGLY: The Jets lost to a team that committed 14 penalties, shanked a punt out of their own end zone with a minute left and plays a quarterback whose decision making mimics that of a 16-year-old left alone for the weekend. Now you know how fans of the Cardinals and Jaguars must feel.
GOOD: Just two games left!
Josh Alper is also a writer for Pro Football Talk. You can follow him on Twitter.
