NASHVILLE , Tenn. — Thirty paces down the hallway, 30 yards clear of a soundly beaten football team, a friendly face approached the man typing furiously into his smart phone, a brace bracketing his right shoulder and a thin smile creasing his face.
“You have to be happy you weren’t in the line of fire,” he was asked.
“I’ve been there,” Mark Sanchez said. “Believe me. I’ve been there.”
For four years, these were Sanchez’s messes to clean up, to answer to, to account for. And Sanchez had plenty of practice. On these very grounds, at LP Field, Sanchez may well have played his last meaningful downs as a Jet last December, and there were vintage banana peels aplenty littered all across that 14-10 catastrophe.
That was hard to watch.
But this might’ve been even harder, for Sanchez, for the Jets who dressed out, for the coaching staff whose very futures are tied so closely to each result of this 2013 season.
Certainly for Geno Smith.
“This is pro football,” Smith said. “Every man has to step up.”
Four times Sunday afternoon, Smith surrendered the football. All four times the Titans turned those gaffes into touchdowns. Twenty-eight points would be too high a wall for Peyton Manning to scale, let alone a rookie quarterback making his fourth start, and a team that simply doesn’t have that much margin for error.
The final score was 38-13, so that alone tells you how costly Smith’s carelessness was to the Jets cause. And in case there was any room for interpretation, Rex Ryan was kind enough to break away from the kids-will-be-kids pap with which the Jets have been buffering Smith in favor of a blunt, honest sentence or two after he was asked, fourth week in a row, if this is the tax to be paid for starting a rookie.
“How many times are we going to make that excuse?” Ryan said. “One of these days we’ve got to learn from it and it better be soon. We’d better learn in a hurry.”
It didn’t take long for the coach to snap out of that, to remind everyone “this isn’t only on one guy,” to take a hammer to the rest of the team, to stress that the Jets were outplayed in every phase of the game, “especially coaching.”
But the evidence was plain, matching sets of picks and fumbles, enough that even Smith himself was moved to walk among his teammates when the carnage was complete and make a vow that seemed as much a pledge to himself as a promise to his mates: “This will never happen again.”
It’s a nice sentiment and Smith, as has been his default position, does seem precociously mature. But at some point the Jets need more than that. At some point you can’t simply file the slapstick under the heading of “rookie mistake” any longer, can’t use the “R” on the roster line to explain away the “L” in the record book.
Accountability is a wonderful trait. But it also wouldn’t hurt to practice the humility that becomes necessary after a great game. It wouldn’t hurt to have one of those soon, to balance things out. And to give the Jets a puncher’s chance, especially on the road. Especially with the Falcons looming in Atlanta next Monday.
“I was too reckless with the ball,” Smith said. “I’m extremely disappointed in the way I handled the ball. I was piss-poor.”
No argument. He was. He should be. He was. He is 240 minutes into his career, and that part is always duly noted when he throws a ball into coverage when he shouldn’t, because those qualify as rookie mistakes.
But fumbling because you don’t secure the ball? Being spared a safety only by a generous referee because you kept drifting backwards, deer-in-headlights frozen, unable to throw the ball away? Fumbling a ball at the goal line after trying to switch hands by going behind your back with it?
Those mistakes have little to do with experience and everything to do with atrocious judgment. Call them what they are: Sanchez-like errors, the kind Sanchez was making long after he could rely on the cover of youth.
Sunday, 30 paces clear of the locker room he used to command, Sanchez could only shake his head, dressed in civvies, waiting to climb onto the team bus. It doesn’t look any prettier watching the bloopers and the blunders than it does committing them.