Mark Sanchez’s Career Deserves More Than to Be Defined by One Play

Mark Sanchez is joining ESPN as a broadcaster, ending an NFL career that people probably assume they can sum up in two words, even if that isn’t true.

The thing about the butt fumble (which has its own Wikipedia page, by the way) is that it was past the end of any reasonable expectation that Sanchez would grow into a decades-long face of the franchise. That possibility, however encouraging during two straight trips to the AFC Championship game, had washed away during the post-2010 free agency spending spree, the long-term signing of Santonio Holmes and the ill-fated experimentation with a Tim Tebow package that would vaporize any chance of normalcy for a once-promising career. If anything,…