Guest post: Tebow Starting? It’s Just A Matter Of Time
Our pal Leslie Monteiro offers us an East Coast perspective on an old friend.
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t’s not a question of if. It’s a question of when Tim Tebow starts as the New York Jetsquarterback.
Make no mistake. Unless Mark Sanchez all of sudden becomes a prolific passer, Tebow will be starting for the Jets at some point during the 2012 NFL season. The team did not acquire him to play the Wildcat or make a play by running for the first down or to the end zone a half-dozen times a game.
Tebow sensed that, which is why he decided to play for the Jets rather than the Jacksonville Jaguars.
Sanchez knows he is on borrowed time. This is what a terrible season can do for a quarterback. He has found out what Tebow learned when the Broncos signed Peyton Manning: football is a business. The team will always find someone that can do better if they want.
In the last three years, the Jets did everything possible to make Sanchez’s job easy by not having a legitimate quarterback take his job. They thought it would be easier for their young quarterback to learn on the job that way.
It was easy to understand why the Jets did it, but it turned out to be a bad idea. Sanchez became complacent, and it showed with him not playing with a lack of urgency at practice and during the games. He played with a laissez-faire attitude, and that turned many players off on the team.
Jets head coach Rex Ryan tried his best to get Sanchez going by giving Jets backup quarterback Mark Brunell reps in practice several times the past year. It wasn’t until Rex threatened his premadonna QB with the threat of benching him for a 200-year-old back up that he applied the proper focus.
The Sanchize doesn’t have that luxury anymore. If he has one bad game or one bad stretch during the game, it will be Tebow Time in a New York minute. This is a referendum for Sanchez. He knows it. It’s fair what the Jets are doing. They can’t keep waiting for him to develop.
The Jets want to know how Sanchez responds to this acquisition. It has been known the third-year Jets quarterback has been sensitive whenever someone questions his performance. All eyes will certainly be on him heading to training camp and this season.
Much has been made of Tebow’s limitations, but at least, he gives the Jets a chance to win if the team plays great defense and run the ball. It’s similar to how Sanchez won games in the last two years. It’s probably the way Ryan prefers to win games.
Let’s be clear the Jets head coach would love to see Sanchez develop into an elite quarterback. He has given his troubled quarterback all the opportunities for the last two years. It hasn’t worked out, and with the head coaching worrying about his job security, he is not going to be patient anymore.
There are good portion of Jets fans that believe in Sanchez. They cited how Eli Manning became a quarterback in his fourth year, and they used his example to prove young quarterbacks take four or five years to become elite.
That’s a good point, but in today’s NFL, it’s a win-now league. There is no more patience. There are many Sanchez critics that want a change a quarterback, and they will demand it if the incumbent quarterback struggles. It’s not just them, but Tebow fanatics and religious zealots will want to see their hero start.
If Tebow relieves Sanchez and engineers a comeback victory, he will be the quarterback for awhile, a fact that seems unwise to bet against.
