Aaron Rodgers - The Big Risk

Edition #314

Good morning 🌟

A different day and another article about a potential QB acquisition. This is the purgatory that all teams live in who don’t have a settled starter.

Zach was supposed to be different, he was supposed to settle this question for the next decade, but here we are less than 2 years later and we’re still chatting away.

I was hesitant to write this newsletter today as any skepticism around acquiring Aaron Rodgers is met with fury online, his hive seems to be as active as Zach’s.

Today I’m just going to outline why I have some reservations.

📝 I missed this news yesterday but the Jets have signed safety Will Parks to a one-year deal according to Tom Pelissero. A 6th-round pick of the Broncos, Parks will enter his 3rd year as a Jet in 2023. Last year he played 210 total defensive snaps earning a 62.5 grade from PFF. He also added 148 snaps on special teams, a good depth piece.

🔴 Alabama OC/QB coach Bill O’Brien is heading back to New England as their OC. Obviously, O’Brien has a long history with the Patriots having worked for them previously and he now gets to coach Mac Jones who he coached at Alabama. That’s a good hire by the Patriots and you imagine that reconfirms their commitment to Mac.

🤠 The Arizona Cardinals are giving Cowboys DC Dan Quinn a second interview for their head coaching job. Quinn worked with the Jets back in 2007-08 as a defensive line coach before moving to Seattle and later becoming head coach of the Falcons.

🏈 Former Jets center Kevin Mawar has been named the Head Coach of the Lipscomb Academy Mustangs. Lipscomb is a private Christian school down in Nashville. They play in the second division of the Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association.

💼 There seems to be growing sentiment among the online community that Nathaniel Hackett is being lined up as the Jets OC. Either there is something out there (I’ve not personally heard anything) which gives this legs, or people are putting two and two together and taking an educated guess.

🏆 Jets corner Sauce Gardner won the PFWA’s Rookie of the Year and the Defensive Rookie of the year award. Receiver Garrett Wilson won PFWA’s offensive rookie of the year.

The name Aaron Rodgers conjures up the image of a great QB, a QB who’s heading to the hall of fame, and a QB synonymous with winning. He may only have one ring to his name and an 11-10 lifetime record in the playoffs, but he has 147 regular-season wins to his name. He’s a 4-time MVP and a 10-time pro-bowler.

Rodgers is currently sitting 9th all-time with over 59,000 passing yards, and 5th all-time with 475 passing touchdowns.

A wise man once said, "Past performance is no guarantee of future results", and that’s almost certainly true with a QB who’s about to turn 40 years old.

People have jumped on reports recently from Ian Rapoport using them as the foundation for the belief that Rodger’s is going to be traded. For clarity, Ian said on the Pat McAfee show that an Aaron Rodger’s trade was “not an impossibility”…yet that has morphed into him actually being shopped.

Would I be excited about the thought of Aaron Rodgers playing QB for the Jets? Absolutely. At the end of the day, I watch sports for entertainment, and he’s an entertaining guy to watch. Would I be nervous about it? Absolutely. Here’s why.

First of all, I want to try something new with today’s newsletter. Without reading any information, I wanted to ask you a question. Then we’ll ask the same question at the end of the newsletter after I’ve presented the statistics and trends, to see if there’s any change.