Mark Sanchez prepares to face Jets fans' negative energy

So what's the pressure on USC's Mark Sanchez going to be like now that he's playing quarterback for the New York Jets?

Boomer Esiason can give him a hint.

Fifteen years ago after an especially disappointing loss to Miami, Esiason, then the Jets' quarterback, was making the seven-mile drive from the Meadowlands back to Manhattan.

While he was slogging through stop-and-go traffic at the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, the car next to him was violently rear-ended. The quarterback threw his car into park, hopped out and ran to the woman whose car had been hit. She was wearing, of all things, an Esiason jersey, and was utterly shocked when he rapped on her window to check on her.

"Are you OK?" he said, trying to keep calm. "Are you OK?"

"Boomer? Is that you?" she asked the good Samaritan, sounding disoriented. "I think I'm OK, but . . ."

But what?

"But you guys sucked."

Welcome to the New York Jets, Mark, where frustration is measured in decades, and quarterback grace periods are as leisurely as shotgun honeymoons. Sanchez won't be holding a clipboard for long behind Kellen Clemens, if at all, considering the way the Jets traded up to the fifth spot to draft him.

Sanchez passed his first test with flying colors. At his first practice with the Jets, Friday at the team's rookie camp, he wowed his new coaches by learning all 18 plays he was shown, rather than accepting the scaled-down alternative he was offered.

"There was some guy who we have who got the entire offense together and installed the base offense," new Coach Rex Ryan told reporters after the first practice. "I guess you can figure out who that was. That's impressive. That's the kind of young man we brought in here."

Ryan was an assistant coach in Baltimore last season, when the Ravens made the postseason behind the very capable play of first-year quarterback Joe Flacco. So this coach knows what rookies can do at the position.

"Up until last year, there was a stigma that you don't win with a rookie quarterback," Ryan said. "I think we proved that wrong."

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As a few of the franchise's former quarterbacks will attest to, however, the pressure will be on the rookie to step right into one of the unique jobs in professional sports and win. Win now.

"Once you get to the aspect of playing quarterback there, it's a totally different realm," said Ray Lucas, a Jets quarterback from 1997 through 2000. "It's like Frank Sinatra said: If you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere."