It's time to end the Mark Sanchez Butt Fumble on Thanksgiving mockery

There are a lot of traditions shared by football and Thanksgiving. Contests in Detroit and Dallas. John Madden and a turducken. Family games of two-hand-touch between servings.

And, for the past 13 years, laughing at the Jets.

The emergence of that annual rite began on Nov. 22, 2012, when, in the second quarter of a primetime game against the Patriots, New England safety Steve Gregory scooped up a loose ball and returned it 32 yards for a touchdown and a 21-0 lead.

That was the least memorable part of the play.

Just prior to that, Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez had turned the wrong way to deliver a handoff. He tried to salvage the broken play, attempted to run with the football himself, started to slide, smashed straight into the backside of guard Brandon Moore, and lost the ball from the force of the collision.

The Butt Fumble was born.

But this Thanksgiving feels like as good a year as any to recognize that moment one last time for all its complexity and meaning and comedy and reverberations and aftermaths and then . . . let it go.

That’s harder to do than to simply write about, although writing it while avoiding cheap puns like “End it!” and “No Moore!” is tougher than all of it. Such lines come across as a little too . . . cheeky. And, yes, the absurdity of making such a claim in a column about the play is rich with irony in itself. We’ll try anyway.

For more than a decade it has stood as the moment of Jets ignominy for this century and perhaps even their entire existence. For an organization that has withstood the fake spike, the Mud Bowl, a Fail Mary pass intercepted and returned for a touchdown, and two  of their most promising seasons derailed by starting quarterbacks tearing their Achilles tendons on opening day, that moment manages to rise above — or is it sink below? — all the others.

“I've had my butt kicked several times, but that was the worst,” Rex Ryan, coach of the Jets at the time, told ESPN in 2022 for the 10th anniversary of the play and the eventual 49-19 loss. “I coached for 30 years; that was the worst quarter in the history of my coaching career, and there's been some bad ones. But not even close to that one. It was brutal.”

The Jets aren’t the only team to have such a meltdown on a big stage. So why, more than a decade later, does this one still ring as loudly as ever?

Part of the reason is that the Jets still haven’t won anything since. When the Giants had their own infamous fumble in 1978 it created an organizational change that led to two Super Bowl wins in the next 11 years. When they lost on DeSean Jackson’s punt return in 2010 they won a Super Bowl the following year. Joe Pisarcik and Matt Dodge became footnotes to success rather than symbols of sustained failure.

Perhaps it was because the Jets had actually been pretty good just prior to that. They had been to the AFC Championship twice in the previous three seasons and were 4-6 heading into that night at MetLife Stadium hoping a victory could set them straight. They still have not returned to the postseason.

Then there was the obvious comic absurdity. Had Sanchez face-planted himself just a little higher or a little lower on Moore’s posterior profile it would not have had such a Three Stooges element to it.

Add to that a national television audience swollen by the holiday, the rare (at the time) primetime kickoff that ensured viewers were in a boozy, tryptophan-induced haze that made them unsure of what they had just witnessed, and the still burgeoning world of social media hashtags that allowed the slow-motion clips of the bungle to circulate further and more rapidly than it felt like any other football play ever had at the time.

All of those pieces created a stew that was swiftly etched into our collective cultural history and has remained.

Sanchez came to crack a few smiles over it later in his career and during his time as a broadcaster, though there was always the undercurrent of frustration over how it was portrayed, how the Jets and their fans treated him afterward, and for how long the gag seemed to last. He had taken the Jets to the brink of two Super Bowl appearances but after that game the team was through with him. He was 26 years old.

“As a competitor, it was frustrating because of the fallout,” Sanchez said on “The Pat McAfee Show” in 2020. “It’s one thing to have an embarrassing play and it’s like, OK, whatever. But when it feels like the organization and people just kind of write you off because of that and all the hard work you put into it gets erased because of one play, well, that’s not necessarily fair.”

This year, of course, there is an entirely new layer to the annual recognition of the moment. A sadder and more serious one. Somehow it manages to make the play Sanchez is most well-known for feel a lot less funny.

Last month, Sanchez was stabbed and hospitalized during an altercation in Indianapolis the night before he was due to call a Colts-Raiders game for Fox. The following day, he was charged with a felony count of battery involving serious bodily injury along with three misdemeanor charges, including public intoxication, from the incident. The truck driver who stabbed him has not been charged.

Sanchez remains free on bond and his trial is currently scheduled to begin next month.

Sanchez and his family often wondered what it would take for the world to get over the Butt Fumble. When would enough be enough?

Sadly, they may be finding out.

So maybe this is the year that we should move on. Tip our buckled pilgrim hats to the fun we’ve had. Clean our plates and then clean the slate for this one particular moment at least.

The Jets are a mess of a team this season and have been an NFL punchline for decades. There are plenty of other plays from their past we can use to illustrate that bumbling. And there probably will be more of them in the future.

Plus, there are so many other traditions around the holidays and in this sport. New ones are coming along, too, like the Black Friday games (upon which the Jets have already made their stamp with that halftime Hail Mary returned for a score) and the Christmas Day slate.

Thirteen years after it came into our lives and entered our lexicon, let’s make Thanksgiving 2025 the year we finally bury the Butt Fumble.

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.