Aaron Rodgers is still not a member of the Jets. This brief saga has already been longer and more voluminous than the four-VHS copy of Braveheart you used to be able to rent at the local library.
In the absence of what Rodgers might refer to as actual news, we often allow our own personal opinions to creep in and color the blank spaces. These worst fears or suspicions could very well be true. Or, they could be getting in the way of a perfectly sensible reason to log jam the plans and aspirations of dozens of NFL teams.
For example …
If Rodgers was simply dragging his feet in order to spite the Packers and torpedo their offseason strategy before eventually signing with the Jets, would you hate that as a Jets fan? If this person was so malicious and vindictive that he was combing through minute ways to cut down the plans of another NFL team, he sounds very much like other celebrated Hall of Fame quarterbacks whose borderline legal “attention to detail” will be lauded in the coming years during their Hall of Fame speeches. If you are not competitive enough to will your jaded lover into complete and total disarray, how are you going to sustain yourself through the grind of a 17-game season?
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If Rodgers was dragging his feet in order to ensure that the Jets would carry out his marching orders, signing Marcedes Lewis, Randall Cobb, Allen Lazard and Rodgers’s physics study group leader from Cal (or he was simply trying to inflate their markets artificially during free agency), would you hate that as a human being used to seeking out your own creature comforts? While none of us are in this same position, we have all had leverage at some point in our lives. We have all been at a crossroads and needed to decide between one choice or the other. We have all hoped one choice would be infinitely better than the other choice so as to make our decision easier. We have all had more and the opportunity to help those with less. LeBron James, for example, lined up a group of his best friends so that he could enjoy winning basketball games. After a ridiculous period of time in which some of you burned his jerseys, didn’t we all kind of come together and say: “Actually, teaming up with all my friends to go play sports in South Beach sounds like a pretty sweet idea?” (As a brief aside, I would argue, emphatically, that if you had Nathaniel Hackett as your offensive coordinator, signing Lazard and Lewis would be beneficial no matter who your quarterback is.)
If Rodgers was dragging his feet because he may actually just want to retire, couldn’t you sympathize? While some of us don’t get to choose how our professional life, or chapters of it, end, Rodgers is wrestling with some pretty hefty ideas about legacy, joy, identity and happiness.
If Rodgers was dragging his feet because he may not really want to play for the Jets and he may want to return to the Packers there is certainly some concern there and the criticism is not only warranted but necessary. Certainly, Rodgers owes the NFL nothing, but leading on a team that is full of perfectly good people who are depending on your candor and honesty, is certainly a choice, but a pretty despicable one at that.
If Rodgers was dragging his feet because he enjoys being some kind of psychedelic ombudsman of mainstream media and takes some sadistic pleasure out of a league and reporters that didn’t value him properly at one point nearly two decades ago now having to adjust their lives to his whims and desires (seriously, Aaron, I missed bar trivia this week), then do you want that guy shepherding a young and very talented franchise through a critical year of development?
And so, this is the multifaceted lens with which we must view our current holding pattern. I think many of us would like to pigeonhole Rodgers into one of the latter categories without considering the first few, or any other parallel NFL universe where certain dates and times matter for financial reasons beyond our comprehension. Or any other flap of mental headspace possessed by Rodgers that we are not (nor do we deserve to be) privy to. Or the fact that this is a trade, which we may have forgotten, and terms between two sides that each believe the other has no choice must be agreed to.
Everything is both so much more complicated than we could ever imagine, and so hysterically simple that all we can do is laugh when we finally get our answers. Such is the world that awaits Rodgers’s next steps.
