With Mark Sanchez finally deciding to have season-ending surgery on his right shoulder, we’ve almost certainly seen the last of the quarterback in a Jets uniform.
That means time is running short for stories about the dysfunctional relationship between the team and Sanchez in the last few months of his tenure. Brian Costello of the New York Post gets one under the wire from the night that Sanchez was injured against the Giants in a preseason game.
Costello reports that Sanchez’s “emotions came out in a behind-the-scenes fit” after he was hurt in the game. Sanchez was inserted into the game with second and third string players in the fourth quarter after the Jets pulled Geno Smith. According to Costello, Sanchez screamed at General Manager John Idzik and was “furious” that the team put him into the game in that situation.
Tension has existed between the team and Sanchez since then, which presumably put the icing on the farewell cake that many expected the team would bake for Sanchez at the end of the season.
A good portion of the criticism heaped on the Jets for playing Sanchez at that moment had to do with the perception that Sanchez had become the starting quarterback by virtue of Smith’s struggles against the Giants that night. With Sanchez out, the Jets had no choice but to start the rookie. No one can know how the last five games would have turned out had Sanchez been in the lineup, but Smith has shown enough positives in those games to fully turn the page from the Sanchez era even before Sanchez officially did it by having surgery.