Sanchez finds his groove in powering Eagles to win

Brent Celek had reached around the head of a Carolina Panthers' defender to haul in the football midway through the third quarter Monday night, a circus catch that ended with his tumbling into the end zone. Thirty yards away, Mark Sanchez raised his hands in a V, thinking that he'd completed a touchdown pass, thinking that Celek had made the kind of play that seemed to benefit Sanchez so rarely during his darkest days with the New York Jets.

Sanchez's thought was wrong. A replay review showed that Celek's knee had touched the turf before he'd crossed the goal line, so Sanchez had to settle for handing the ball off to LeSean McCoy for an easy 1-yard touchdown run in an easy 45-21 victory for the Eagles. As low moments go, that's about as bad as it got for Sanchez on Monday, having technology steal a touchdown pass from him.

The box-score line for Sanchez in his first start for the Eagles, in his first start since late December 2012, reflected a welcome departure from the quarterback he was in New York: 20 completions in 37 attempts, 332 yards, two touchdowns, and - most important - no turnovers. This was always going to be the question that Sanchez had to answer once Nick Foles fractured his clavicle last week and Sanchez assumed the Eagles' starting quarterback job: He had to prove that he could run Chip Kelly's offense with the right combination of pace and care, that he could keep those qualities in their proper proportion.

For one night, he did. If anything, the Eagles found that they could rev up their offense to a faster speed with Sanchez than they had this season with Foles. To start the second quarter, they ran 10 plays and advanced 91 yards for a touchdown in 3 minutes, 35 seconds of game time and in about 3 minutes, 43 seconds of real time, moving so quickly that the officials had to stop play because, in the words of referee Gene Steratore, they "weren't in position to officiate."

To anyone who had spent any time watching Sanchez earlier in his career, the speed and crispness of the Eagles' offense Monday was startling to witness. Over his four seasons with the Jets, Sanchez had gone from a young and developing quarterback who was mostly along for the ride to two AFC championship games to a skittish, unreliable player prone to inexplicable mistakes. He'd committed 52 turnovers during the 2011 and 2012 seasons, more than any other player in the NFL. He'd never completed more than 57 percent of his passes in any season. He'd thrown 70 touchdown passes and 71 interceptions, a 1-1 ratio of good to bad that in today's quarterback-catered game marked him as mediocre, and at their best with him, the Jets just plodded along on offense, grounding-and-pounding and minimizing Sanchez's influence.

Late in the spring of 2011, Bret Johnson had set aside a full weekend to study film from Sanchez's first season in the NFL. From a pure football standpoint, no one knows Sanchez better than Johnson and his father, Bob, who run a highly regarded quarterback camp in Southern California and who have tutored Sanchez since he was 12. And from that New York Jets' 2009 tape, Johnson could see the strategies that opponents had used to confuse Sanchez, and he could sense how Sanchez's mind raced to decode those tricky blitzes and coverages.

Sanchez, though, never appeared to advance beyond that rudimentary understanding of how to play quarterback at the highest level, and once a shoulder injury kept him off the field for the entire 2013 season and once the Jets released him in March, it was easy to write him off as another big-name, first-round bust. But remember: Sanchez played under three offensive coordinators with the Jets, and Kelly's quick mind and slimmed-down system offer him both the comfort and creativity that any quarterback craves from a play-caller.

"In high school, he hit on 73 percent of his balls in a two-year period," Johnson said. "That was in the highest level of football in California. He was accurate there. In college, he was very accurate. It just takes a couple of years to get it to where you're not thinking as much. When you're thinking, it's going to affect your accuracy. It's going to affect everything that you do."

That's the thing about Kelly and his system: As demeaning as it sounds, Sanchez doesn't have to think now. He just listens to Kelly, sizes up the defense, and acts accordingly, and the simplicity of that process freed him to play Monday with a confidence that he'd lost long ago. Had Celek somehow maintained his balance and barreled into the end zone, sure, that would have made the whole night a little sweeter, but as low moments for Mark Sanchez go, it still was a hell of a lot higher than they used to be.

@MikeSielski