Aaron Rodgers of the New York Jets looks on during warm ups prior to the game against the Pittsburgh Steelers at Acrisure Stadium on October 20, 2024 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Aaron Rodgers sat at a long conference table in the summer of 2023, a few weeks ahead of his first regular-season game with his new team. Hope sprung eternal at the team facility back then. A longtime Jets reporter made a crack about a feeling of déjà vu — they’d been here 15 years earlier, only with Brett Favre, Rodgers’ predecessor with the Green Bay Packers, who spent one season with the Jets.
“I hope that’s the only thing that’s déjà vu,” Rodgers answered.
In a way, it held true: Rodgers’ season (plus four plays) with the Jets wasn’t like Favre’s — it didn’t go nearly as well. The 2008 Jets started 8-3 but narrowly missed the playoffs after a late-season collapse, finishing 9-7, with coach Eric Mangini fired and Favre released in the aftermath. Favre had been seen as more of a hired gun for the Jets that year, while Rodgers was brought in with hopes of turning the team’s culture upside down. Instead, the Jets are in the same place as when he arrived, perhaps even worse off depending on how you view it.
On Thursday, the Jets made it official: Rodgers is out. He is likely to be released with a post-June 1 designation at some point in the coming days, shoved out the door by the team’s new head coach (Aaron Glenn) and general manager (Darren Mougey). The end of — what turned out to be — an error.
It started off with optimism. Rodgers’ time with the Jets, while ultimately underwhelming, will end with one of the bigger what if’s in franchise history: What if he didn’t tear his Achilles four plays into the 2023 season? Maybe it wouldn’t have worked out anyway — Rodgers had shown signs of decline during his last year in Green Bay, and turned 40 during his first season in New York. But nobody could have predicted everything that would transpire, even if the Jets-Rodgers marriage was weird from the get-go.
It started when Rodgers went into a “darkness retreat” in February 2023 (90 percent retired, per Rodgers), only to emerge wanting to play for the Jets. The trade negotiations with Green Bay languished for two months. On his first day at the Jets facility, he walked into a meeting barefoot. At his introductory press conference, he declared that the Jets’ lone Super Bowl trophy, won by Joe Namath in 1969, looked a little lonely. The Jets granted Rodgers the power to push team decision-makers into hiring or signing or trading for his closest friends, or players he simply wanted to play with, even if they weren’t good fits (like Nathaniel Hackett, Allen Lazard, Randall Cobb, Dalvin Cook, Billy Turner and Tim Boyle). To his credit, Rodgers gave back more than $30 million in salary to help the Jets add to the roster, it’s just that very few of those additions worked out.
“Hard Knocks” cameras followed the Jets all offseason in 2023. The hype machine got out of control. And then it died when Rodgers tore his Achilles. A few weeks later, he went on Pat McAfee’s show and declared that his teammates needed to “grow up”. His relationship with Zach Wilson deteriorated. Rodgers, very publicly, tried to rehab his injury enough to make a remarkable comeback before the end of the season, which served as more of a distraction than a motivation for his teammates as they struggled through a campaign without a viable quarterback. He gave his endorsement to bring back Robert Saleh and GM Joe Douglas for 2024, which surely played a role in owner Woody Johnson not firing them. He got into hot water for accusing Jimmy Kimmel of being involved with Jeffrey Epstein just ahead of a season-ending press conference during which he declared the Jets needed to rid themselves of all non-football distractions.
At the end of that first season, Rodgers said that everyone was on the hot seat — and, obviously, he was right. This past year, he skipped two mandatory minicamp practices for a pre-planned vacation to Egypt. He got into animated arguments with Garrett Wilson during training camp, negative energy between the two stars that seemed to seep into the regular season. He awkwardly pushed Saleh away early in the season when the Jets coach tried to hug him during a touchdown celebration, and got into a war of words, fought through the media, with Saleh when the coach raised questions about Rodgers’ cadence at the line of scrimmage.
This interaction between Aaron Rodgers and Robert Saleh
In the aftermath of a convincing 24-3 Thursday night victory over the Patriots on Sept. 19, Rodgers said that the Jets needed to learn how to handle success. They lost five straight games. During the slump, Saleh was fired, Hackett was demoted — Rodgers was more unhappy about this than he let on publicly, according to team sources — and eventually Douglas was fired too. Rodgers’ relationship with Johnson deteriorated, bringing him to the point of taking shots at his boss (sometimes subtly, sometimes not) and even once making a joke on McAfee’s show about Johnson’s teenage son.
He threw wide receiver Mike Williams under the bus for running the wrong route, resulting in a late interception during a close loss to the Bills. According to a report, Rodgers refused to get scans on his leg when he was clearly injured, determined to play through the pain — a move that earned him more respect from many teammates, though it impacted his play to the point that, analytically, he was one of the NFL’s worst performing quarterbacks for a stretch. He tried to force feed Davante Adams, his best friend, in a quest to throw his 500th career touchdown pass.
No. 500 came in Week 18, in a four-touchdown performance, perhaps Rodgers’ best game in a Jets uniform, coming in a meaningless win against the Miami Dolphins. He walked off the field with Adams that day, with the vibe of someone who didn’t expect to be a Jet anymore. Now, he isn’t.
His final stats look good on paper (3,897 yards, 28 touchdowns and 11 interceptions), one of the best statistical seasons in franchise history for a team that has had a lot of bad quarterback play. However, those box-score statistics don’t tell the whole story. He had the second-most pass attempts in the NFL — and the Jets, at Rodgers’ behest, threw the ball more than any other team in the red zone. Among quarterbacks with at least 250 pass attempts, Rodgers was 30th in completion percentage, 26th in EPA per attempt, 20th in passer rating and 31st in air yards per attempt.
In some ways, the tale of Rodgers’ time with the Jets is complicated: Most of his teammates loved him, there were moments when he thrived, and he genuinely wanted to change the team’s culture. But when boiled down to a binary analysis — was it a success? — the answer is no. Now he’s gone and the Jets, again, will try to find a quarterback capable of turning things around.
Toward the end of that August 2023 meeting with the media, at that long conference table, Rodgers waxed poetic about how meaningful his time with the Jets, and in New York, had been to him so far.
“This has felt like waking up inside of a dream, this whole experience,” Rodgers said. “A beautiful dream.”
Not long after, he woke up.
