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This is getting out of control and unbelievably unfair – MARK SANCHEZ IS NOT LAZY. THE QUOTE HAS BEEN TAKEN OUT OF CONTEXT OVER AND OVER AGAIN!
I have to be honest, I know reporters are supposed to leave emotion out of their work, but this is really pissing me off.
This is all started with a quote, from an unnamed player, in a Manish Mehta story in January.
“We have to bring in another quarterback that will make him work at practice,” said one unnamed Jets player to the Daily News. “He’s lazy and content because he knows he’s not going to be benched.”
Ever since this story, this quote has taken on a life of it’s own.
But the life it’s taken, is a pathetic, misleading one.
It’s been all over the media – debated on dumb television shows, the subject of tons of blogs.
Rich Cimini had an interesting story yesterday about Sanchez, and what he has been up to over the last few months.
The Jets quarterback has laid low, not doing interviews, not going to the Super Bowl, trying to stay out of the limelight.
It was a very good story, but then it got to the Sanchez being “lazy” quote.
Cimini asked Sanchez’s personal trainer, Jay Norman and his high school coach Bob Johnson, what they thought of the “lazy” quote.
Here are the three paragraphs dealing with this on the ESPN New York website –
“Norman fumed when he heard that an unnamed Jets player, quoted in the newspaper, questioned Sanchez’s work ethic. That’s not the player he knows, he said, the player who spent his bye week at home, working out.
“Johnson, too, was annoyed.
“‘It kills me,’ Johnson said. ‘That’s just stupid.’”
Johnson is right. It is stupid. And Norman has every right to fume.
The Mehta quote has been taken out of context ad infinitum.
And this is another example.
Sanchez has a tremendous work ethic – anybody around the Jets knows that.
Sanchez is a tireless worker.
What the unnamed player was talking about, and he probably should have chosen his words more carefully, is that Sanchez is competitively lazy, that he doesn’t feel pushed, doesn’t feel he could lose his job.
The last three years, Rex Ryan acted like it was sacrilege to ever think of pulling Sanchez from a game.
A lot of people cut Ryan slack on this one last year, because Sanchez’s primary backup, Mark Brunell is 41. So the perception was that the coach had nowhere to turn at quarterback, so he might as well stick with Sanchez.
If Greg McElroy didn’t hurt his hand last summer, it would be have been interesting to see what Rex would have done during the Sanchez swoon.
You can say a lot things about Sanchez, but one thing you can’t say is that he’s lazy.
That is crazy talk.
And the reporting on this quote hasn’t been very good, or very fair.
Most reporters know darn well what the unnamed player was getting at, but continue to take it in a direction that is irresponsible.
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