I'm not sure a preseason game can ever be described as good, but they can definitely be bad and the Jets performance Saturday night was about as bad as it gets. Look what they made Rex Ryan do.
Rookie quarterback Geno Smith was putrid. He threw three interceptions in one half and then Orlovsky'd himself out of the quarterback competition. Unless...
Yep, that's right, we all forgot Mark Sanchez. Well, he didn't distinguish himself either. He fumbled his first snap and then injured his shoulder on the next possession (on what was actually a nice play [sigh]) behind the second team in the fourth quarter. He went in for X-rays at the stadium and will be getting an MRI to determine the severity of the injury. But he was injured and that was the moment the NY media officially and completely turned on Rex Ryan and it's what caused Rex's transient ischemic attack up there in the video.
This was before the press conference even started.
That's a beat writer, calling for the coach's head in Week Negative 2.
Should Sanchez have been in the game with 11:20 left to go in the fourth quarter? I don't know, I'm not a football coach nor am I privy to whatever the Jets management has in mind for its quarterback competition. It definitely seemed weird, though. The head-scratchiness of it coupled with the worst-case-scenario outcome was as if someone swapped water for chum in the ocean.
And Rex Ryan had to go behind a podium and talk to the sharks knowing that his quarterback options were either a rookie who is at least as flawed as his veteran is right now, or an injured version of that veteran. So maybe Rex deserves a break. He found himself between an almost inconceivably self-created rock and a hard place; the most Jets thing ever.