Question for the times

 I could be snarky here, a couple of days after. I could do that.

I could say if Indianapolis really wants to do something about violent crime in the downtown area, it should keep Mark Sanchez out of the city.

I could say Mark Sanchez forgot the first rule of a rumble, which is never bring an NFL analyst to a knife fight.

I could joke. I could make light. I could go for the big laugh and the "Oh, man, you are so bad."

But Mark Sanchez, NFL analyst and former New York Jets quarterback, lies in a hospital bed after being knifed in Saturday's wee hours, a circumstance he apparently bought with his own dime. According to Indianapolis police, he got angry because a 69-year-old delivery man wasn't moving his truck out of the loading dock area fast enough, jumped in the truck with him, and started a scuffle that didn't end until the delivery man stuck a blade in him.

Tried to fend Sanchez off with pepper spray, the delivery man did, and that didn't work. Sanchez kept coming after him, so the delivery man did what he had to do to stop him.

Now Sanchez, who was in town to work the Colts-Raiders game, is facing three misdemeanor charges -- one of them, as might be guessed from the past-midnight time of all this, public intoxication.

And now my wife Julie, as we discussed this whole deal the other day, raising a question uniquely suited to these times: Is Mark Sanchez suffering from CTE?

It's a question sprung from the landscape of decades, of case after case of former athletes flying into rages over nothing or committing suicide because they couldn't stand the chaos in their heads anymore. It's about Dave Duerson shooting himself in the chest so the docs could study his brain, and Junior Seau jumping off a cliff, and a former Steelers defensive lineman named Justin Strzelczyk ending his life one September day in 200 by crashing head-on into tanker truck at 100 mph while driving on the wrong side of busy New York toll road.

A post-mortem examination of Strzelczyk's brain indicated that, sure enough, he was suffering from CTE.

I don't know if that's the case with Mark Sanchez. But the sheer irrationality of what apparently went down in Indy early Saturday morning makes it a fair question.

This is, after all, a man who played in 79 NFL games across eight seasons, and was sacked 168 times in those 79 games. Seventy-three of those sacks came in 2011 and 2012 alone, when the Jets went 14-18 and had the sort of offensive line you'd figure a 14-18 team would have.

It was also right about the time the NFL was reluctantly admitting that, yes, head trauma was a problem in its national game. Which means concussion protocols and helmet-to-helmet hits were not as rigidly policed as they are today.

So, yeah. You read about Sanchez going after a 69-year-old delivery man over, well, nothing, really, and it makes you wonder what Julie wondered the other day.

Could CTE be at work here?

A question for the times. A question for the times indeed.