FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — For the Jets and their emotional coach, Rex Ryan, this was their benchmark game.

As in, bench Mark Sanchez.
Because if you don’t pull a struggling rookie quarterback early in the fourth quarter of a game like Sunday’s, with only 10 points separating the two teams and the hopes, however dim, for an entire season hanging in the balance, when exactly do you pull him?
The answer, apparently, is never.
With 10:37 left in the one and only must-win game of their season, the Jets had all the necessary reasons — three interceptions accounting for 10 first-half Patriots points and one aborted second-half drive — and they had the perfect opportunity, a game still close enough to justify a bold move that might have resulted in a victory.
For whatever reason, Ryan chose to stick with Sanchez, who promptly gave away the ball a fourth time, and with it, the game and the season.
Pass the Kleenex, please.
“No, absolutely not,” Ryan adamantly said when asked if he had considered replacing Sanchez with Kellen Clemens before the eventual 31-14 loss got out of hand. “I don’t think he’s going to get any better sitting on the sidelines.”
Maybe not, but on the field, Sanchez clearly is getting worse. And taking the Jets with him.
You can talk all you like, as Ryan did, about the Jets getting outplayed by the Patriots and outcoached by Bill Belichick, but the No. 1 reason the Jets lost was their own No. 6.
From throwing a pick-six to Leigh Bodden to fumbling the ball away on the Jets’ final possession, no player did more to ensure the Jets’ sixth loss of the season than Sanchez.
After a stunningly impressive start to his rookie season, including a win over the Patriots at Giants Stadium in Week 2, it is clear to anyone not drawing a Jets paycheck that Sanchez is regressing.
Ten games into his pro career, the game is not slowing down for him, it is speeding up. Never did he look more like an overmatched rookie than on his fourth and final interception — but not turnover — of the day, when under pressure from three Patriots defenders, he blindly flipped the ball downfield like a man hoping to persuade a pack of hungry pit bulls to play “go fetch.”
But the defenders didn’t want the football, they wanted the quarterback. Besides, they probably knew someone else on their team would come up with the ball, which Patriots safety Brandon Meriweather did.
Eight plays later, Laurence Maroney burst into the end zone from a yard out and a surmountable 24-14 Jets deficit became an insurmountable 31-14 Patriots lead.
In the next series, Sanchez coughed up the football a fifth time while being sacked, but it no longer mattered. Way before he was stripped of the ball, he already had been exposed.
Even Ryan seemed to realize it, because even though there was more than five minutes left on the clock, plenty of time to put up a quick score, he chose to have Sanchez do nothing more risky than hand the ball to Thomas Jones. It was like a trainer telling a fighter who had lost the first 11 rounds to box in Round 12.
Whether this was done to protect Sanchez from further humiliation, or because Ryan no longer trusted him to throw the football, or a public admission that Clemens (with all of eight career starts, none of them very good) really was not a viable alternative anyway, the effect was the same — a concession speech on the game and the season.
Sanchez’s final stats — 8-for-21 for 136 yards with a touchdown and a 37.1 QB rating — were not his worst of the season, but the difference between his play Sunday and in the Week 6 loss to Buffalo, in which he threw five picks, was incremental at best.
“It’s hard to see in the stats, but I’m learning a lot,” he said. “I just need to play a lot smarter.”
“I think he’s getting better,” Ryan said. “I don’t think he’s regressed to the point where we would even consider benching him. He’s our quarterback for now and he’s our quarterback for the future.”
A quarterback whose benchmark game had come and gone, and with it, the hopes for yet another Jets season.