Think Happy Thoughts About Aaron Rodgers (Or Else)

Once displeased, the monster can wish his coach into a cornfield or change him into a grotesque, walking horror.

What’s stunning about Aaron Rodgers’ latest, greatest power play is its senseless brazenness. Or perhaps its brazen senselessness.

The New York Jets, now 2-3 after back-to-back losses, are underachieving. It’s partially Rodgers’ fault. It’s partially Nathaniel Hackett’s fault. But Rodgers, the omnipotent manchild, cannot be blamed. Nor can Hackett, Rodgers’ faithful offensive coordinator and chamber-pot sanitizer. So Robert Saleh was fired on Tuesday, even though Saleh’s defense has been the least of the Jets’ problems and his “leadership” has been inside scare quotes since Rodgers joined the team.

There’s no logic to the decision. No effort will be made by anyone to apply logic to it. No one even bothered to wait until a week or two after Rodgers threw three interceptions in a loss to the Vikings. There is no reason for a capricious despot to keep up appearances. Rodgers demanded a scapegoat. Jets owner Woody Johnson, a marshmallow-brained multimillionaire with a compulsion to acquiesce to the loudest megalomaniac in the room, was overeager to oblige.

For petty, powerful men like Rodgers and Johnson, solving meaningful problems is always a tertiary objective, behind: 1) assigning blame for their own failures to others; and 2) exercising power for its own sake.

Rodgers satisfied his impulses in Green Bay by reading training-camp manifestos against Packers management and pouring accelerants on Mike McCarthy rumors. The Jets, however, granted Rodgers Palpatine-worthy puppet-master powers in their sweaty effort to get him to like them. Neither Saleh nor general manager Joe Douglas have wielded any real authority beyond overseeing defensive game plans and selecting late-round draft picks since Rodgers arrival. Rodgers chose his supporting cast. He dictates the team’s personnel strategy. Hackett’s game plans are his personalized mommy meals. Rodgers even controls the team’s messaging.

When Rodgers was injured last season, he did not need to block the team from signing a Joe Flacco-level veteran replacement; Douglas and Saleh were already too cowed to consider it. When Rodgers wanted to pretend he had Wolverine’s mutant healing factor and had recovered from a torn Achilles in weeks instead of months, the Jets obligingly took him off the IR and let him hobble heroically around the practice field instead of activating a healthy, helpful player. Rodgers then tellingly deemed last year’s Jets unworthy of his services and did not deign to play. Rodgers wanted his absence to be the defining characteristic of the Jets 2023 season, and the organization obliged by publicly humiliating itself every week.

Saleh appeared to know his roles: figurehead, factotum, glorified customer service representative. But Saleh had the temerity to suggest that Rodgers’ cadence caused Jets offensive linemen to jump offsides in the Week 4 loss to the Broncos. Thoughtcrime! Why, teaching the linemen to predict Rodgers’ whims is Hackett’s Saleh’s job! Saleh backpedaled immediately, but he was on borrowed time from the moment he misspoke. He only lasted until Rodgers cleared customs from England and decided that the subject of Sunday’s loss needed to change.

Jeff Ulbrich will replace Saleh; Rodgers knows Hackett is obedient but incompetent, and he doesn’t want his therapy pet to stray too far from his side. Ulbrich will have all the authority of a junior-high hall monitor. His promotion will only ease locker-room tensions because Rodgers is the source of such tensions, and the public beheading of a treasonous coach should keep him in a soothing post-coital glow for a few weeks.

Imagine poor Douglas right now, frantically trying to overpay in a trade for Davante Adams as if he were a Roman quaestor seeking a new exotic beast to slaughter in the Coliseum for the emperor’s amusement. The moment Adams is traded to a different team or the deadline passes, Douglas will join Saleh’s midweek coffee klatch. Heck, the Jets bye week is not until Week 12. The equipment manager could be the Director of Football Operations by then.

Asking what all of this means for the Jets would be missing the point. The Jets are irrelevant to Rodgers. He is the de facto ruler of the Jets. Therefore, the Jets are irrelevant to themselves.

Rodgers only wants to win another Super Bowl or MVP award in the abstract sense that he craves sources of validation. Wanton abuse of influence is another source of validation, one which is far easier to tap and provides a more immediate buzz. The Jets exist to make Rodgers feel superior. The worse they get, the more superior he will feel. He’ll burn everything down just to show that he can. He can no longer bother pretending otherwise.

If you don’t find that satisfactory, well, you don’t matter to Rodgers either.

Having started this mini-column with a Twilight Zone reference, I will wrap it up with a pull quote from my 2022 New York Times feature about the declines of Rodgers, Tom Brady and other aging quarterbacks. Note that Rodgers is once again facing the Bills in a potential knockout game and that Adams was being floated about as the prognosis/panacea for the Rodgers problem two years ago.

Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers, 38, stood at the lectern for his news conference after Sunday’s loss to the lowly Washington Commanders wearing what appeared to be a bathrobe; he looked like a cross between a Star Wars cosplayer and a young billionaire who just started jarring his toenail clippings.

“This might be the best thing for us,” the ever-cryptic Rodgers said of his team’s third consecutive loss. Rodgers-ologists began fiddling with their decoder rings to interpret his meaning. The Packers are now 3-4 heading into a showdown with the Buffalo Bills (5-1) that looks more like a potential knockout blow than a Super Bowl preview.

Rodgers feels the absence of the All-Pro receiver Davante Adams, whom the Packers traded to the Las Vegas Raiders in the off-season, in large part because they needed cap space to pay Rodgers. Packers Coach Matt LaFleur uses presnap motion and other window dressing to help inexperienced receivers get open for short passes, and Rodgers has never been fond of motion, inexperienced receivers, short passes or head coaches.

While the declines of Brady and others may feel tragic, they are really just cases of the N.F.L. ecosystem healing itself. Declining skills, increasing salaries, prickly egos and long-indulged eccentricities hollow out pre-eminent quarterbacks from within. Mighty redwoods must fall so Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen can fully bask in the sunlight and saplings like Justin Herbert and Jalen Hurts have room to grow strong. Lionized quarterbacks aren’t going extinct; they’re merely participating in the circle of life.

Just don’t let Brady or Rodgers hear that.