Despite soreness, Sanchez 'ready to go'

FLORHAM PARK, N.J. - If Rex Ryan had known Mark Sanchez was going to play as well as he has since coming up with a sore right shoulder, perhaps he would've tried a little voodoo treatment, sticking his quarterback with a few needles to get him nice and tender.

"We kind of joked a little bit," Ryan said Tuesday, "that maybe we should have done this to him earlier."

Sanchez has played well since he got banged up early in the Jets' Dec. 19 win in Pittsburgh, completing 60 percent of his passes (41-for-68) for 539 yards with a touchdown and an interception. Still, some have questioned if Sanchez is hurting more than he's letting on, especially because he didn't rule out the possibility of offseason surgery.

But the second-year signal-caller reiterated Tuesday that his shoulder isn't an issue and he's not concerned about it heading into Saturday night's AFC wild-card matchup with the Colts at Lucas Oil Stadium.

"I'm feeling good," said Sanchez, who was limited to eight handoffs in one series against the Bills on Sunday, "and ready to go for Saturday."

That soreness, he said, hasn't altered his ability to do what he wants to do.

"It doesn't affect it much," Sanchez said. "We're just being smart about it, taking the right reps, getting the right throws and approaching it the same way we have the last few weeks. But it felt good today."

Good enough that he took more reps than he did in Monday's practice, which is a positive sign. With the team playing Saturday, it's a shorter week, meaning they treated Tuesday as a typical Wednesday, and Sanchez put in plenty of work.

"I got probably almost all the throws," he said. "I felt good with the plan, and accurate and I threw the ball well."

Ryan validated that.

"We still limited his throws, but I thought he was bouncing around pretty good," Ryan said. "He even looked better as the practice went on to me . . . When he's in a game, he can zip it like he always does."

In order to have a legitimate shot at taking down Indianapolis, the Jets will need Sanchez to whip the ball around effectively. In the Jets' 11 wins, Sanchez completed 178 of 306 attempts for 2,146 yards, 15 touchdowns and five interceptions, posting a rating of 89.4. But in their losses - with the exception of the Bears' game - he was 84-for-173 for 979 yards with one touchdown and seven interceptions, and a rating of 51.4.

So the Jets will need him to be as efficient as he was in their victories and play at the same level he did during the Jets' postseason journey to the AFC Championship Game against the Colts last year.

He was on point against Indianapolis in the AFC title game, going 17-for-30 for 257 yards with two touchdowns and an interception with a 93.3 rating. That kind of experience is inval uable.

"I'm feeling better toward this tail end of my second year," he said. "I feel light years ahead of where I was last year, just mentally, knowing the schedule, understanding what a playoff game feels like, anticipating the kind of energy that you get from their crowd and how you need to be loud at the line of scrimmage, little things that I had to experience first to understand now and I feel a lot better."