They will play the Super Bowl next Sunday in Las Vegas, another place where the Jets should have won but didn’t because they had the worst quarterback play this season since leather helmets. Or maybe just since last season.
Now it’s fair to wonder where the Jets are going to be a year from now when it’s time to play Super Bowl 59, which will be No. 56 since they won the only Super Bowl in which they’ve ever played. That was when Joe Namath made the plays he had to make and Matt Snell played the game of his life and they shocked the world.
That was very much then, though. This is now. So, really, where WILL the Jets be in a year with not only the oldest quarterback in the league, a quarterback who will be 41 by then if he’s still standing, and one who will be coming back from a torn Achilles tendon?
You bet the Jets will be letting it ride on Aaron Rodgers the way they’d hoped to let it ride this year before Rodgers went down four plays into the season. He held the ball, which he does, and got hit and went down for the count. It was, of course, a calamity. But knowing what we know now about Joe Douglas’ offensive line, a line that currently has four holes to fill between now and the start of next season, what was shocking wasn’t that Rodgers got hurt, it was simply that it happened as quickly as it did.
When they do it again in September, Rodgers will be 40 going on 41. Now let’s look at the rest of the field in the NFL, and the ages of all the other important quarterbacks across the league:
Patrick Mahomes, who will start for the Chiefs next Sunday in Vegas, is 28.
Brock Purdy, the 49ers starter, is 24.
CJ Stroud is 22.
Justin Herbert, who just won Jim Harbaugh in the football lottery, is 25.
Jalen Hurts is 25.
Jordan Love, perhaps the Jets quarterback in another 15 years, is 25.
Josh Allen and Joe Burrow are both 27.
Tua Tagovailoa is 25.
Jared Goff is 29.
Dak Prescott is the geezer on this particular list at 30.
The only quarterback of consequence close to Rodgers’ age, unless you think the Browns are going to circle back to Joe Flacco next season with all the money they’re paying Deshaun Watson, is 35-year old Matthew Stafford. You can put Russell Wilson, who’s also 35 on this list if you want to, maybe when he makes his next stop. Just not now. We’ve all heard all the reasons why Sean Payton benched Wilson at the end of the season for Jarret Stidham. But he still benched him for Jarret Stidham.
If you are a Jets fan, and just read a terrific piece by Zack Rosenblatt and Dianna Russini in The Athletic about dysfunction around the 2023 Jets that was sometimes almost Biblical, are you even sure that Rodgers will still be around next February? Or do you think next season will be Super Bowl-or-bust the way this one was supposed to be?
Or maybe, and more likely, the Jets will once again be looking for Rodgers’ replacement, after coming into this season apparently thinking the 39-going-on-40 Rodgers was going to be more durable than Eli Manning once was over in the Meadowlands.
And it’s not just Rodgers, the single most powerful figure in an organization for which he still has only played four snaps, and his future we need to be talking about. Is Joe Douglas, the front office guy who fell head-over-heels in love with Zach Wilson, still going to be the general manager in a year?
Is Nathaniel Hackett, whom only Rodgers seems to think is the greatest play-calling wingman in all of pro football history, still going to be the offensive coordinator? For now all we know about Hackett is that he seems to be the best offensive mind the Jets have had on the payroll since Adam Gase.
But maybe the best question of all is this one:
Who is going to be the HC of the NYJ in a year?
If you read The Athletic, you know how fixed Robert Saleh was on getting a vote of confidence from Woody Johnson as the season was winding down, despite the fact that his record as Jets coach was winding down to 18-33. Seriously, though, what happens next year, with Rodgers back on the field and Hackett calling the plays for him and most of that defense still intact, if the Jets start out 1-5? What will Douglas do then, if Douglas himself is allowed to survive a start like that?
If Saleh gets fired, who becomes the Rodgers-approved coach then — Hackett? You saw what happened to him when young Mr. Hackett was at the controls in Denver. He was 4-11 before he got fired, because that’s the kind of record that gets you fired, unless you work for Woody, that is. By the way? This is what the owner had to say when his team started out 1-5 this past season:
“I’ve been around for going on 22 years, with my little absence I’ve had recently, and this is a good group. We will get it right.”
You saw how that worked out. Somehow Rodgers’ injury gave everybody a hall pass (though Wilson probably would have thrown an incompletion on a hall pass if given the chance, and as much as I was rooting for the kid). So, almost everybody in charge except an assistant GM survived 7-10, even though having had a professional back-up quarterback in place might very well have turned that record right around.
People say: But Tom Brady played like a star after he was 40. He did. He wasn’t coming off the kind of injury that Rodgers suffered on opening night against the Bills. Rodgers himself says, “Give me your doubts.” Well, sign me up for that. To expect him to come back from that injury, at this age, and expect him to be the player he was even three years ago when he was winning his last MVP award is as crazy as his nutball theories about Dr. Fauci.
Rodgers’s presence here got everybody believing the Jets really were set up to make a Super Bowl run. Another nutball theory. Then he got everybody to believe he was going to come back and play in December. He didn’t. It doesn’t change the fact that he’s still the whole ballgame for the Jets who, if they didn’t have more holes on offense than a colander, are another Jersey team that ought to be thinking about drafting a quarterback.
These are your Jets, 55 years after Jan. 12, 1969. Where do you think they’ll be at the start of Super Bowl Week in New Orleans next February, when two more 20-something quarterbacks will be getting ready to face off in Super Bowl 59?
BRUNSON AND THE FEEL-GOOD KNICKS, ROOTING FOR DOC & KICK THE FIELD GOAL, DAN …
This is Jalen Brunson’s second season, but first making these Jalen Brunson’s Knicks.
Tom Thibodeau has been around for a while, and the Knicks did give us that surprise run to No. 4 in the Eastern Conference in 2021.
Julius Randle has been around a year longer than Mr. Thibs.
But what these Knicks are doing, in real time, the way they’ve played since the trade for OG Anunoby, feels very new.
It feels new in a way that the Knicks felt new when Pat Riley first got to town, and his Knicks ended up surprising us all by going seven games with Michael Jordan and the Bulls.
The Knicks felt like the only feel-good story in town then, and feel like one now.
And suddenly are as close as they are to the No. 2 in the conference.
The Boston College head football coach, Jeff Hafley, made the jump this week from my school to being defensive coordinator for the Packers.
Hafley won’t be the last college coach to make this kind of move.
He got into the transfer portal before the transfer portal got him.
Doc Rivers has always been one of the good guys, all the way back to when he was with the Hawks.
I first met him when he came to the Knicks, and have rooted for him ever since, and that’s why I hope he can figure things out in Milwaukee, where he played his college ball once for Marquette.
Red Sox fans worry that their owner, John Henry, whose Fenway Sports Group is now bigly involved with professional golf, has forgotten that there wouldn’t be a Fenway Sports Group if it weren’t for what his baseball team has done over the last 20 years or so.
Maybe now that Theo Epstein is with the FSG, he can get Henry’s eye back on the ball.
Meaning a baseball.
Nobody’s been doing Mike Breen any favors since the end of the last NBA season, but it doesn’t change the fact that there still isn’t a better play-by-play man, in any sport, than Breen is.
I love what Dan Campbell has done with the Lions and for the city of Detroit in the process.
But he should have at least kicked that field goal last Sunday when a field goal would have tied the game.
Speaking of Detroit:
Watch out for the Tigers this season in the AL Central.
I tell you this with pride, and as someone whom George Costanza once called his favorite sportswriter:
I can’t wait for Episode 1, Season 12 of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” on Sunday night, just because there has never been anything quite like it on HBO, or anywhere else.
One more thing:
After my friend Mr. David’s hilarious appearance on “The Today Show” the other morning, I told him that I always believed he could take Elmo in a fair fight.
