Jets vs. Broncos: Mark Sanchez Hits Rock Bottom in Loss to Tim Tebow

Any hope of Mark Sanchez ever finding his way into the upper echelon of NFL quarterbacks will have to wait...for a while. The more pressing task for Sanchez, after failing to lead his New York Jets to victory over the Denver Broncos, is to seek stability in respectability, of which he'll find little in the Big Apple now that he's been outperformed by Tim Tebow.

If Tebow is "ugly, but effective" as NFL Network analyst Mike Mayock described him after the game, then Sanchez is just plain ugly. Against a Broncos defense that came into the night ranked 20th in the league against the pass, Sanchez managed a somewhat respectable 252 yards on 24-of-40 attempts with one pick.

Statistically speaking, that's still better than Tebow, who completed just 9-of-20 pass attempts for 104 yards.

As far as wins and losses are concerned, though, Sanchez could stand to learn a thing or two about winning from his Mile High counterpart. Tebow isn't a good passer by any stretch of the imagination, but at least he does other things on the football field well enough to get his team on the right side of the ledger.

And please, spare the bit about Sanchez and the Jets playing with an unusually short week to prepare, against an unusual offense, after an equally unusually poor performance against the New England Patriots on Sunday. Sanchez has been to two AFC Championship Games in two seasons since leaving USC for the NFL. Granted, he wasn't necessarily the catalyst behind those postseason runs, but he was at least competent enough in his duties to not detract from his team's efforts.

At this point, Sanchez needs to be doing more than just the bare minimum. He's in his third season after successful rookie and sophomore campaigns, yet he's still struggling to perform consistently despite having taken the reins of the offense from Day 1 of the Rex Ryan regime. Simply put, Sanchez has played more like a fifth-round pick than the fifth-overall pick in the 2009 NFL Draft.

More importantly, if the Jets are to have any hope whatsoever of making it back to the playoffs, much less make a run to the Super Bowl, then they'll need Sanchez to step up his game considerably between now and the new year.

And rather than trying to play better than Tebow, Sanchez may first want to play like Tebow.

Not by running and scrambling, but rather by leading and winning rather than losing.