Mark Sanchez Has to Handle the Heat for Jets' Offense

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. -- It's easy to worry about Mark Sanchez. For all of the bluster and hype and offseason influx of talent, these Jets are still very much about their 23-year-old quarterback. Their Super Bowl dreams are still very tightly tied to the ability of young Sanchez, in just his second pro season, to play as if he's a seasoned veteran. And the pressures he confronts are unique and massive. He's playing in New York. His team has the highest aspirations. He's being asked to mature much more quickly than quarterbacks should, and to do it under the hottest of spotlights.

Friday night, for example, was just a preseason game. Preseason NFL games are among the most meaningless exhibitions in all of sport. They tell us almost nothing about a team's prospects. The Lions, two years ago, went 4-0 in the preseason and 0-16 in the regular season. And yet, because this is football and it means SO MUCH, everybody forgets and starts scrambling for meaning. For reasons to panic. After the game -- an ugly 16-11 "loss" to the Redskins -- a reporter told Sanchez that his fourth-quarter touchdown pass to Dustin Keller was the first touchdown the Jets' first-team offense had scored in the preseason.

"Okay," Sanchez replied.

Yeah, it's easy to worry about Mark Sanchez ... until you hear him talk.

"He never blinks," said Jets running back LaDanian Tomlinson, who was New York's offensive star of the night with 86 rushing yards on 11 carries. "He's always going forward. He's not worried about what's said or what's just happened. He's cool and calm on the sideline and in the huddle, and he's a guy who can handle success and also handle when things don't go well."

Those are the qualities on which the Jets are counting. They know Sanchez can make all the throws. But he -- and to a large extent their season -- will rise and fall on his ability to handle things. And that means everything -- the excitement of a hot streak, the disappointment of a bad interception, the intensity of the scrutiny his every move will receive ... everything. As closely as the Jets are watching him on the field, they're also watching him in the locker room, after the game, when he stands in front of the cameras in his perfectly tailored suit and doesn't sweat.

"It's fine," he said, without blinking, when asked if he minded all the questions after a preseason game. "We're not playing the way we should and we have work to do. It would be worse if we were throwing for four touchdowns and then came out flat (in Week 1) against Baltimore."

He has a veteran's perspective. He says the right things. He handles the pressures of the public nature of his job exactly the way they need him to handle them.

"It doesn't surprise me," Tomlinson said. "I think when you play at a program like USC, you're used to handling pressure and performing at a high level. He's got great parents who taught him right. He's got the background he needs to succeed."

On the field? Well, Sanchez remains an NFL work in progress. He's had a couple of bad interceptions this preseason, and he knows it can't continue like that into the regular season. He knows the biggest part of his job between the lines is to avoid turnovers.

"We can't have 'em," Sanchez said. "Whether it's preseason, regular season, playoffs, whatever. We can't have them, and I've got to take ownership of it."

That message is coming from above him, too. The kid gloves are off this year. No more color-coded wristbands. The Jets will still be a run-first team, but they're going to ask more of Sanchez than they did when he was a rookie. And when he messes up, they're going to let him know about it. The red-zone interception he threw Friday night was not glossed over.

"You have to realize that there are times to take chances and times not to," Jets coach Rex Ryan said. "The way we play defense, kick the field goal. The way Nick (Folk) kicks off, the offense is going to have to drive 80 yards on us. We don't need to force passes."

Sanchez knows that, of course. But it's no longer good enough for him to look at each game and each mistake as merely a learning experience. Even though they all are still learning experiences, he's now tasked with the difficult trick of learning and winning at the same time. Which is why it bears mentioning how he recovered from the early troubles to lead that second-half touchdown drive.

"He's not going to be perfect by any stretch," Ryan said. "It was a mistake, a costly mistake as it took points off our board and basically got them out of a hole. But he did respond and I think he did a great job responding in the second half, and that's what was important to me out of this game."

Right. It's not as if he can't make mistakes. It's just that the making of the inevitable mistake is another thing he has to handle. There are a lot of those, and Sanchez's ability to handle them all is still -- for all the talk about the defense and Darrelle Revis and the offensive line and whether Shonn Greene can handle the load -- as important a factor as any in determining how far these Jets go.