“Well, what if there is no tomorrow? There wasn’t one today.”
— Phil Connors
“They say our love won’t pay the rent
Before it’s earned our money’s all been spent …”
It feels that way, doesn’t it? Feels like we’re trapped inside a time-space continuum vacuum (and yes, I believe that is the first sports column in sports column history to use consecutive words with double-u’s.)
It feels like Punxsutawney Phil is taking his sweet time finding his shadow. And while we’re on the subject: has anyone ever seen Robert Saleh and Ned Ryerson in the same room at the same time?
Welcome to “Groundhog Day.” Welcome to the Aaron Rodgers Jets. We are officially out of the dark, and officially through the looking glass all at the same time. The Jets are officially going to run all of this back. This is all happening earlier this time around, Rodgers talking about next season at Christmas time rather than near St. Patrick’s Day, the Jets spinning everything ahead to 2024, 11 full days before the ball does that in Times Square.
And so we are back. Back to assessing the Rodgers Era on spec. Back to watching the Jets try to construct a balanced roster — with that equilibrium based less on the logic of building with the best available players than on assessing those players’ compatibility with the franchise centerpiece who has spent exactly four snaps center-piecing the franchise.
It’s a hell of a way to run a football team.
Actually, it’s a ridiculous way to run a football team.
But that, in essence, is the only out the Jets have left themselves. They have invested so much capital, so much energy, so much oxygen into the Aaron Rodgers Experiment that they have given themselves little choice but to stay the course — no matter that the course is filled with more potholes than the West Side Highway after a blizzard.
As long as Rodgers wants in, so do the Jets. So must the Jets.
And Rodgers wants in for 2024. At least.
“I don’t think next year will be my last year,” he told Pat McAfee on Tuesday. “I feel like I can play more years and I can be effective into my 40s.”
For now, the Jets only care about his next season, which he will spend at both age 40 and age 41. And it means at least another year of the Jets’ unwritten corporate credo. You’ve heard the old chestnut about how to maintain a marriage? “Happy wife, happy life.”
The Jets add a twist:
Happy 8, Life’s just great.
He isn’t the only one who’s happy. Robert Saleh, who in the kindest possible terms has done a poor job this season, is delighted that he gets another year despite a record that presently sits at 16-31. Joe Douglas, who committed borderline malpractice by refusing to sign a solid backup behind his 39-year-old star — then doubled down by failing to take advantage of the fact that Rodgers’ calamitous injury came early enough in the season to allow a mulligan on that misstep — has to be ecstatic. He’s been here even longer than Saleh.
And any NFL veteran out there who can sell himself as a Rodgers crony — to be next year’s Allen Lazard and Randall Cobb and Tim Boyle — has to be blissful waiting for their agent to whisper in Woody Johnson’s ear.
The only ones not happy, as always, are Jets fans who, as always, are asked to invest in the year to come and forget the one they’re in. Which they will. Soon enough Rodgers will start doing real quarterback work again — if not in the next few weeks, surely by OTAs, and those images will be dutifully beamed to the world.
Summer will arrive, and with it a familiar litany of hopes, most of them attached to a 40-year-old with a bum wheel, the rest endowed in trusting that the GM can build a whole new offensive line, get another receiver and keep as much of his defense intact as the salary cap allows. Rodgers will be kept in Bubble Wrap — probably the whole way this time.
And then it’ll start all over again.
In a lot of ways, if the Jets were headed for catastrophe this year, they’d have been better off seeing Rodgers looking as old as his birth certificate, waiting until the 40th or the 400th snap before something snapped or broke instead of the fourth. Then they could start over. There is a certain nobility in taking a big swing, then conceding it whiffed.
Instead, the Jets got limbo, a football purgatory that has been torturous to watch, and because of the way the season started they expect fans to ignore what has to be a haunting question: Even if Rodgers had stayed healthy, how good could this team really have been?
They’ll never know. Neither will you. So it’s a full reset. It’s a full runback. It’s “Groundhog Day” for Jets fans, without even Andie McDowell around to serve as a consolation prize.