This was an NFL front-office executive from an out-of-contention team speaking yesterday morning after spending a good portion of his Sunday night watching tape of the Jets’ 26-3 rout of the Buccaneers.
“If I were the Jets,” he said, “I would lose no sleep about who my quarterback is going to be. The kid, Sanchez, is going to be a good one, but you don’t want to turn his knees to spa ghetti. Kellen Clemens is no more than a career backup, and Brad Smith can take more snaps than he has, and it really shouldn’t matter. All of it doesn’t matter, and here’s why:
“The Jets can win any game they have left with Thomas Jones carrying the ball 25 to 30 times, and by making sure you never give the defense a short field. You know how much of a gift that is? Protect the ball, score three at a time, then put everything in the hands of the defense. That seems a sensible plan to me.”
It seems a sensible plan to a lot of the guys in the Jets’ locker room, too. Look, they realized late Sunday afternoon that they hadn’t throttled the 1972 Dolphins in the searing Florida heat. They are also well aware that this three-game winning streak that has revived the season and re-sparked playoff possibilities has been gained at the expense of Jake Delhomme, Ryan Fitzpatrick and Josh Freeman, three tomato-can quarterbacks who could help any defense look like the Steel Curtain.
“We can only worry about what we do,” linebacker David Harris said. “We can only worry about how hard we play, how much effort we bring, and how well much we play up to our potential. I think we’ve done that the past three games; I think the whole team has done that. And I think we still will.”
The whole season has been centered around a delicate balance that few teams have ever successfully pulled off: weighing the development of a rookie quarterback in one roster slot with the urgent demands of the 52 others, most of whom fall under the win-now heading. The Jets had to work in Sanchez, that is non-second-guessable; you don’t invest that much in a player and not use that player, especially without a viable back-up.
But here is the simple truth about Sanchez’s season: The six games he started that the Jets won (Houston, New England, Tennessee, Oakland, Carolina, Buffalo), he “won” exactly none of them. He managed the games, he kept costly picks to a minimum, he did what was asked of him. In other words: He was a more stylish-looking version of what Clemens gave them Sunday in Tampa.
Of the six games he started that the Jets lost, he played heroically in one (at Miami), was a benign non-factor in two (Jacksonville, home to Miami) and was the primary reason they lost three (at New Orleans, Buffalo, at New England). In other words: A gameplan more closely resembling Sunday’s in Tampa would almost certainly have yielded one more win (the Bills debacle) and might have helped steal one other.
Again: This isn’t a call for Sanchez’s benching. If he’s healthy enough to play this Sunday against Atlanta, he plays.
It is a reminder that not every game plan has to resemble the ones Jim Kelly used with the Houston Gamblers back in the day. And on a team like the Jets, a team that really does have a legitimately top defense and does have a workhorse back in Jones, keeping it simple is the key.
The Jets still have gobs of work ahead of them, and it’s a measure of just how difficult their playoff task is that — now that the Colts will almost certainly treat their Week 16 game as a glorified exhibition — the part of the formula that seemed hardest (getting to 10-6) now actually seems more reasonable than to expect any three of the other five teams the Jets are battling for the AFC’s final three spots — all of whom have a tiebreaker edge over them — to offer the outside help they need.
That, of course, is a worry for another day. For now, if the Jets did nothing else in Tampa, they discovered what the necessary blueprint is to get to 10-6. And as long as the running backs and the defense show up to play, it really shouldn’t matter which quarterback does.