Questions I Would Ask Mark Sanchez

1. Mark, I know you are thrilled to be working with Rex Ryan and Brian Schottenheimer, but a lot of the problems from high-draft pick QBs has been caused by turmoil in the offensive scheme. I know you “just want to think about the 2009 season,” but a first round QB is judged on a three year scale today. How well would you be able to adjust if Ryan and Schottenheimer, for whatever reason (including success), weren’t around over all those three years?

2. Today most athletes have to worry about cell phone cameras at every party they go to. It’s not just Matt Leinart who’s had this problem. How does a quarterback from Long Beach who went to school at USC and is now the future of a New York pro team get to live accordingly without dealing with those pressures?

3. Are you more likely to have bouncers ban cameras wherever you go than let any random person take a picture of you?

4. New York sports fans have a larger Hispanic presence than many cities’ Sports fan base. While our Mexican-American fanbase isn’t as large, the New York Mets were able to take many fans away from the Yankees due to their increased Latino presence under Omar Minaya. If you were to succeed as a star for the Jets, how much would reaching out to New York’s potential Hispanic be a priority for you?

5. Which of your fellow USC QB alumni would you least like to go against in 2009?

6. Which former Trojan defensive player do you fear most in the NFL?

7. How much do you hope to play in 2009? How much do you think would be best for your career, the team this season, and the franchise in the long-term?

8. Would you place more priority in signing the most expensive contract you find or getting into camp on time?

 

 

Why Rex Ryan’s 3-4 Defense Is Different Than Mangini’s

Under Eric Mangini, the Jets had a 3-4 defense. Awesome because the Jets have a 3-4 defense under Rex Ryan, too!

The question is what do we need to change? 



Well, Ryan brings major changes to his defensive scheme. And those changes are mostly for the better.

While the 3-4 defense is, in fact, coming back in vogue in the NFL, the nuances of each system determines whether a 3-4 defense with talent is Super Bowl bound or just another 9-7 team on the brink of a playoff birth.

In the case of the Jets, they are certainly better off in a 3-4 system with Kris Jenkins, Calvin Pace, and yes, even Vernon Gholston.

Just imagine: the Jets actually made it to the playoffs with Dewayne Robertson as a nose tackle in a 3-4 defense. That alone may be where the nickname “Mangenius” came from. 



So we’ve got Rex Ryan, another 3-4 evangelist, at the helm now. He has brought in “his guys,” including Bart Scott, Lito Sheppard, Jim Leonhard, and Marques Douglas, who signed with the Ravens on three non-consecutive occasions in the Rex Ryan era (take that, Grover Cleveland!).

How is Ryan’s 3-4 different from any other 3-4?

Mainly that he will mix and match the use of base, over, and under defenses in his schemes. This is the kind of multi-dimensional defense that any D-coordinator would kill to create.

They key, as always, is right kind of talent. 


You probably know Over and Under defenses from Madden—they’re the last variable that comes up after you’ve already called the formation and play.

In a 4-3 defense, a base defense has the linebackers are distributed evenly behind the linemen. Over means the linebackers are shifted more to the strong side, while under shifts closer to the weak side. The point of an over/under shift is to move to an offense’s point of attack.

When Shaun Alexander led the Seahawks to the Super Bowl in 2006, he did so by running almost exclusively to the left, where Walter Jones and Steve Hutchinson were his blockers. If you were to shift Terrell Suggs, Bart Scott, and Ray Lewis closer to the right side of the defense in that formation, you’d understand how an over/under defense could be effective. 



The main benefit of the 3-4 over the 4-3, of course, is deception; in a 4-3 defense, you can usually expect the defensive line to be the primary rushers. In a 3-4, you have no idea who is rushing, which makes things exceptionally confusing to blockers when making their first move.

Normally, leaning linebackers over or under would be a good indication of where they are heading—that is why over/under formations are usually used more heavily in the 4-3. In Rex Ryan’s schemes, however, he will add the same kind of deception to who is rushing to who is covering what side of the field. Players between those strong enough to penetrate the O-line, fast enough to run from end to end, and those who can do a little of both.

This kind of defense proved to be the best especially useful in countering Peyton Manning.

The definitive Rex Ryan player is probably Adalius Thomas, who could play at all three levels of the defense in a way that would have been impossible to imagine 30 years ago. He wasn’t as superhuman as Shawne Merriman, but that he could move as fast despite weighing 270 pounds meant he always had a role to fill in Ryan’s defense. 



The aggressiveness needed for an over-under 3-4 scheme results in a higher chance for disaster if the front seven doesn’t do everything right. To offset that risk, a strong secondary is a must. With two world-class corners in Darrell Revis and Lito Sheppard, and an incredibly athletic safety in Jim Leonhard across from All-Pro Kerry Rhodes, the Jets secondary is one of the strongest the team has had in my lifetime. Bart Scott, a Pro Bowler, is a machine and one of the most intimidating, versatile linebackers in the NFL. It’s hard to play second fiddle to Ray Lewis, but despite his unsportsmanlike penalties helping cost the Ravens the game in their legendary 2007 Monday Night Football matchup against the Patriots, it ultimately proved to be a coming out party for him. His ridiculous intensity on the field went overboard there, but he did so against a team everyone hated and wanted to beat just as badly that year. Rex Ryan would be smart to remind Scott that we are not is not in 2007 before the Jets’ two games against the Pats this year. 



Make no mistake, the Jets were a playoff team last year. If not for Brett Favre’s disastrous December, the team would have made it through at least one round of the playoffs. Kris Jenkins playing through pain caused most of last year’s defensive problems toward season’s end. After he had carried the team through the first 11 games, the D still adjusted reasonably well to his decreased effectiveness, just not well enough. With a healthy Jenkins, the defense should be not be the main issue for the Jets. This defense is stacked, so much so that they can overcome an injury to just about any other defensive player.

The offense is really what will make or break the Jets in 2009.

 

 

 

How Rich Kotite’s Jets Made Me the Fan I Am Today

In 1995, I started watching football much more seriously than I had before. I had been devoted fan of the Yankees since 1992, the Rangers since 1993, and the Knicks since 1994. With all the success these franchises were having at the time, I could be accused of front-running if I wasn’t from New York City.

Of course, it didn’t help my case that the Packers, a team I was already destined to be loyal to, were doing well at the time.

In fact, not even my college football team, the Columbia Lions, whose football team was best remembered for “The Streak” in the 1980s, could help fully bring me crashing down to sports loser reality. This was the era of Marcellus Wiley, future NFL Pro Bowler and record contract signee, who in 1997 led the Lions to their one good season in my time rooting for them.

So I was ridiculously spoiled as a sports fan at a young age, and in desperate need of a team that would be my own personal whipping boy, a team that showed me sports fandom was not about winning or losing, but absolutely, unwavering loyalty, no matter how badly your team sucks.

To that end, the Jets of the Rich Kotite era were a godsend.

In reality, when I started watching football in the 1990s, I rooted for the Packers, Jets, and Giants with equal passion. This is less of an egregious act in the New York sports culture than dual Yankees-Mets fandom. Yet, football at the time was still something of a third or even fourth sport for me: remember, this was when the Knicks weren’t the embarrassment of the American sports establishment.

When I became a more devoted fan later in my life, I eventually filtered out the Giants, and the Jets eventually even overtook the Packers as the apple of my football eye. In the mid-90s, the Giants, locked in the Dave Brown era, were not that much more successful than the Jets.

What the Jets provided, however, was a team so remarkably bad at every level, from the owner’s box through the front office down to the third-string long snapper, that nothing they did after that could surprise me.

There have been several Jets heartbreaks in seasons after Bill Parcells took over in 1997, and last season’s may have been the worst of them all, as it compromised just about everything I have loved about football: Brett Favre, fleeting dominance, not rooting for your opponent, holiday cheer.

But a five-month relationship that ends in heartbreak is nothing compared to a violent, emotionally abusive two-year relationship, where every week you think things will turn around, and every week, it just gets more and more agonizing. Pete Carroll’s later success at USC was not that much of a surprise to me: During the Rich Kotite years, Carroll may as well have been Bear Bryant by comparison.

In 1995, Carroll was fired after one season and a 6-10 record for a Jets team that hadn’t won more than eight games in a season since 1986, the year I was born. There uniforms will still in the ugly puke-green era, and the most notable accomplishment of a Jet I had witnessed to that point was Dennis Byrd learning to walk again.

Suffice to say, the Jets were already a joke, and the fact that the Jets were hiring Kotite, the coach who had orchestrated an epic regular season collapse by the Eagles the year prior to being hired, only reinforced the fact.

At best, Jets fans were hoping to get a display of fabulous mediocrity, a coach who led us to 6-8 wins the next two or three seasons before he was fired for a real coach.

We were right on the timing and the ultimate result, but the two years in between turned out to be a level of hell Dante forgot.

What was so shocking about the Jets’ awfulness in that era was how even a team expected to be crappy still somehow managed to underachieve. OK, the Jets had terrible game planners, offensive and defensive schemers, and late game strategists.

Yet, they still had poured enough money into the team where the few talented players could make something happen, right? As it turned out, Kotite’s skills were so bad that he could even turn our best player, a former MVP at quarterback who was still only 34 years old, into a crappy, frequently injured sad sack.

His replacement, Bubby Brister, seemed to have a perfect name to define this stage at the Jets era—in fact, I’m tempted to believe Kotite brought him to the Jets from the Eagles based on his name alone. Thank God Brian Griese got the starting job over Brister after Elway retired; if Bubby Brister had gotten it, there may not be a Denver left today.

In 1996, we turned to a more recent Super Bowl quarterback (and Super Bowl loser) in Neil O’Donnell, and the results were even worse: Six games, Four (four!) touchdown passes,  seven interceptions, and 67.8 QB rating.

After the failures of Frank Reich and Glenn Foley, Jets fans actually missed Brister. What was particularly frustrating about these two seasons was that the roster did have players who would later become proven talents, but were wasted in the prime of their careers: Mo Lewis, Richie Anderson, Victor Green, Marvin Jones, and Aaron Glenn were all key parts of the Parcells-era Jets.

Unlike in later Parcells takeovers, there was not as massive a roster overhaul in 1997. The fact that Parcells could succeed so tremendously with more or less the same supporting cast is why Jets fans consider Kotite one of the worst coaches in NFL history.

In fact, Kotite, like Isiah Thomas a decade later, was not a bad evaluator of talent. He added rookies like Ray Mickens, Wayne Chrebet, and even Hugh Douglas; trading Douglas was probably the biggest misstep of Parcells’ tenure with the team.

That’s why I don’t castigate Kotite for his job at the NFL draft, even though he is responsible for the most definitive image of Jets’ draft day disasters (“We want Sapp! We want Sapp!”… “With the 9th pick, the Jets select…Kyle Brady!”). Hugh Douglas, the who came just seven picks later, was a forgotten victory of that draft.

It could be argued that the worse draft day occurred the next year, picking Keyshawn Johnson No. 1 overall the next year, ahead of Marvin Harrison, Eric Moulds, and Terry Glenn. With the first pick of the second round, the Jets picked Alex Van Dyke, ahead of Mushin Muhammad, Amani Toomer, and Terrell Owens.

One bust TE and a Pro Bowl DE over a Hall of Fame DT looks a lot better than selecting two wide receivers in the fist two rounds, neither of whom turned out to be in the top five of receivers selected that year.

Which is all to say that once the Jets became good in the Parcells era, and a mixed bag after that, I took every victory to heart, having felt like I had earned it more than any other team I rooted for.

Not only that, but the Jets prepared me for the devastation the James Dolan era would bring to the Knicks and the pre-lockout Rangers. I would probably not be as much of a sports fan anymore if I hadn’t had the Kotite Jets to put things in perspective; hell, I may even not like the Yankees without that perspective. 

Despite having gone nearly a decade without one of my teams winning a championship, and despite the fact that I passed an age and maturity level when most young fans stop caring, I still obsess over sports as much—or even more so—than when I was in the fourth grade.

Thank you, Rich Kotite, for being the pathetic excuse for a human being I so sorely needed.

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