My buddy Pete, who became a Jets fan because his father was a Jets fan, texted me as soon as it happened with Aaron Rodgers. We already knew it was bad. We just didn’t know how bad, didn’t know that Rodgers’ season was over almost before it began, that his football career might be over, that his lifetime stat line as a Jet might end up being 0-for-1, one sack, a stat line that feels like 0-for-everything today.
“I’ve seen this in my nightmares for five months,” is what Pete wrote.
We knew this could happen. We just didn’t want to think it was going to happen with Rodgers, even at the age of 39, knowing he was going to turn 40 on Dec. 2. We didn’t want to think about nightmares because we wanted to believe in the fever dream that Rodgers was going to come here, even at his age, and maybe take the Jets all the way. We all got blinded by the light of the hype, and Rodgers’ star power, and the excitement among all fans like Pete who have lived and died with the Jets their whole lives, waiting for somebody to come along and do what Joe Namath had once done.
But guess what? There was always a better chance that Rodgers was going to get hurt than lead the Jets all the way back to the big game. But by Monday we had talked ourselves into believing that Rodgers was going to blow past his 40th birthday and keep being Rodgers the way Tom Brady kept being Brady. Only now we find out, in this sudden and shocking way, that this is one more area where Rodgers isn’t Brady. Only Brady got to be Brady forever.
Old quarterbacks get hit, and sometimes it doesn’t matter whether or not it’s a hard hit. They get hurt. We just decided it wasn’t going to happen to our old quarterback until it happened right away, as everyone on the Jets was still being carried along by the pre-game noise at MetLife Stadium, the way the place sounded and felt. Then a guy missed a block and the old guy went down in a truly lousy sports moment on a lousy excuse for a football field.
It happens to Aaron Rodgers now the way it happened to Vinny Testaverde once, the year after Vinny had taken Bill Parcells’ Jets all the way to the AFC championship game against John Elway and was certainly going to take them that far the next year, and then all the way to the Super Bowl. Then Vinny went down in the opener with an Achilles. I was at that game and wasn’t around for the fourth quarter because I had followed Vinny, and what was left of that Jets season, in an ambulance all the way back to Lenox Hill Hospital in the city.
So, yeah, now it does happen again, a handful of plays into the most anticipated opener in the history of New York football, and that means either the Giants and the Jets, and even in other years when we thought one of our teams might win it all. It is Rodgers’ Achilles this time, and it is Robert Saleh’s job to try to pick up the pieces the way Parcells did that season after he’d lost Vinny. The Jets would start out 2-6, before Parcells finally went with Ray Lucas at quarterback, and they got hot and finished 8-8. Saleh? He gives the ball back to the kid, Zach Wilson, who was such a ball of fire the last time he had the ball that the Jets made the kind of huge, all-in bet they made on Rodgers.
Just like that Rodgers is gone, and you’d say he was never really here, except that he had become as big a star as we had in sports before he even took an official snap. It makes me recall a story Bob Knight once told me, from when he was a boy-wonder coach at Army. Mike Silliman, an Olympian, was his star. Then Silliman got hurt and he was the one who was lost to Knight for the season.
Knight called his mentor Clair Bee and said, “What am I going to do without Silliman?”
And Bee said, “Who’s Silliman.”
“What he was telling me,” Knight said to me much later, “was that the team that had Silliman on it no longer existed.”
Aaron Rodgers’ Jets no longer exist. Again: No one could have seen the nightmare coming this fast, the season having barely begun. But the possibility of it always existed, lurking in the shadows through all the months when Rodgers was squarely in the middle of one spotlight after another. Of course, the possibility was there, in a sport where the quarterback is the most important player on the team and the back-up quarterback is the second most important player.
Now we will find out if what the Jets did on Monday night after Rodgers went to the tent and then to the locker room is sustainable, both in the short run and long run. We will find out once again whether or not their general manager, Joe Douglas, blew the second pick in the draft on a kid, Wilson, who simply isn’t very good. We will find out if the Jets season is going to be more than one amazing comeback win, ending with a walk-off punt return by a kid who barely made the team.
It will be a while before we know if Aaron Rodgers’ Jets career didn’t even last one full series of downs, if his career stat line will be that 0-for-1, with one devastating sack. All we know for sure is what it felt like to be a Jets fan when he came running out of the tunnel Monday night.
“I’d do it all over again,” my buddy Pete said.
