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New York Jets Rumor: Decision Makers Ready to Roll With Geno Smith

Joe Camporeale-USA TODAY Sports

The Daily News reports the key decision-makers with the Jets are ready to hand the keys to the team over to Geno Smith.

The Daily News has learned that Ryan, Idzik and much of the team's key decision makers are on board with moving on from Mark Sanchez.

Although speculation centered on Ryan's desire to cling to Sanchez, sources told the News that Ryan believes that Smith is the better option if healthy.

At the very least it is good to hear this team's damaging attachment to Mark Sanchez seems to be ending. I think one of the things that has made the attachment so detrimental is how legitimately it was to talk oneself into believing Sanchez should continue to be the quarterback through the years.

Just think of all of the rationalizations that have been made through the years. He won four road Playoff games. He led those clutch drives. Kellen Clemens is a lousy option. Mark Brunell is a lousy option. Tim Tebow is a lousy option. Wayne Hunter was a turnstile. His offensive coordinator stinks. His position coach stinks. He hasn't had any continuity with his receivers. His receivers stink.

Now people say Geno Smith isn't ready. You don't need to be a Sanchez apologist to have said any of those things above. They were all true. They miss bigger issues, though. Sanchez had adversity, but his play independent of those variables was nowhere near good enough, and there are too many examples of his failures on things that could not possibly have been the fault of anybody but Sanchez. There were some outstanding individual moments, some that Jets fans will remember warmly for the rest of their lives. The totality of Sanchez, however, was nowhere near good enough, and it probably never will be.

There have always been excuses to play and believe in Mark Sanchez. There always will be excuses to play and believe in Mark Sanchez. To this point in his career, the team has done nothing but believe in those excuses, and that has been to the detriment of the New York Jets. There was a degree of outrage discussed by a minority but a vocal one at the suggestion Sanchez should have been cut after the team drafted Geno Smith, but this team needs a clean break from Sanchez to eliminate that temptation once and for all. Frankly, Sanchez probably needs a clean break from this team to have a miniscule chance of resurrecting his career.

These temptations Sanchez has provided have even spilled over into the discussion of how to best proceed with Geno Smith. There is now a large school of thought that since Sanchez played off the bat and was a bust that the team should not roll with Geno right away out of fear of that happening.

Winning and player development are frequently competing goals on a team. A team has to balance out the need to win immediately with developing players over the long term, which frequently means a player struggling and hurting the team in the short term to learn and improve. The Jets do not have that dilemma. Geno Smith did not look very good against the Giants. Even though some people seem to feel putting his performance into a big picture context is giving Geno a pass or suggesting he wasn't bad, the truth is he did not look like a guy ready to lead a team to big things in 2013. There will likely be growing pains, and things will look very ugly at certain points. The goal if he plays will be for him to learn, improve, and be able to take more of the load through the season even if the win-loss record is not great. The alternative is more rationalizing Sanchez starting, and the team once again going nowhere. In that light, the choice of Geno seems like a sound one.