The Aaron Rodgers era in New York was always headed for the exit, and the latest reporting makes that part feel even more settled.
According to Zack Rosenblatt of The Athletic, Woody Johnson would have been open to bringing Rodgers back if the next head coach and general manager had wanted it. But after a wide-ranging search that included more than a dozen head coach candidates and multiple GM options, none of them were interested in keeping Rodgers in the building.
That left Aaron Glenn and Darren Mougey with a clear mandate: start over. They chose to wipe the slate clean as soon as they could, and they were not alone. Every candidate who came through the process landed in the same place on Rodgers.
For Jets supporters still arguing that the team should have stayed the course, that’s the part that matters. This wasn’t a split decision. The people being asked to take over the franchise did not look at Rodgers and see a future worth preserving.
Rodgers’ side of the story has gotten a boost from his trip to the playoffs with the Pittsburgh Steelers, but that hardly tells the whole tale. He landed on a 10-7 team, and that 10-7 team lost in the wild card, just as the Steelers did in what the source describes as an even more damaging way.
The bigger issue for the Jets was never just Rodgers himself. It was the reality of what keeping him would have meant.
Glenn and Mougey’s biggest misstep, according to the source, was turning to Justin Fields. Fields had already shown, less than two months into the season, that he is not an NFL starter and is barely an NFL backup.
But the point remains: if Rodgers had been the choice instead, the Jets still would have been looking at a rough season. The source lays it out bluntly - maybe five or six wins instead of three, but with a massive dead cap hit and Rodgers’ difficult personality hanging over everything.
That’s where the split inside the fan base gets strange. Some Jets fans who back Rodgers and are against Glenn have built a version of events where Glenn is too inept to deserve another year, yet Rodgers, who posted essentially the same numbers in Pittsburgh that he did in New York, supposedly would have fixed everything.
The setup around Rodgers in New York wasn’t exactly ideal, either. He would have been operating with the lowest average depth of target in the league, under a first-time head coach and offensive coordinator, with the offensive coordinator now fired, Josh Reynolds as the No. 2 receiver, and one of the youngest rosters in the league. The source also points to the possibility of a disgruntled Garrett Wilson being in the mix.
New York is still not in a perfect spot, but the current path at least points somewhere. The team added quality veterans in free agency and has Geno Smith in town, giving it a clearer route to improvement and, eventually, a better future. Rodgers, meanwhile, still has the Steelers’ latest wild-card chase ahead of him, and once he retires, the uncertainty will be theirs alone.
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