One NFL week down, 17 to go …
• I had a thought a few weeks ago about Aaron Rodgers. More than anything, it was something I’d noticed about him.
Obviously, the 39-year-old quarterback doesn’t appeal to everyone. That’s fine. A lot of us are like that. But what I picked up was that, for the most part, the people Rodgers has issues with are either on an even plane with him, or above him on the org chart. In other words, Rodgers has almost always punched up, and never really punched down—most of the trainers, the equipment people, and the support staff in Green Bay were good with him.
So I took the idea to Jets coach Robert Saleh a couple of weeks ago.
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“A lot of people have asked me what surprises me most about Aaron, and I think it’s how thoughtful he is,” Saleh says. “I think when people think he punches up, it’s because he challenges [people]. He challenges people beneath him, too. In his mind, he’s just challenging. People who are in superior settings usually look at that as challenging [authority] rather than, All right, let’s figure out how we can constructively improve. As far as I’m concerned, he’s been unbelievable. He’s got questions. He’s got thoughts. He’s got all the same things we all do.
“He’s willing to voice his opinion, and if you have an explanation from him, he’s good. A lot of the time he’ll be like, That’s actually not bad. Let’s implement that. I don’t think he’s got a malicious bone in his body. He’s a people person. His superpower is his ability to communicate and ask questions and relate to people. I think his thoughtfulness has been so much more than I ever anticipated.”
I witnessed a little bit of this the day I was at Jets camp, when Rodgers threw on a practice pinny and jumped in with trainers and strength coaches who were standing in as defensive players to give Zach Wilson and the second offense a quick look in a walkthrough period. At this point, it was nearly a month into camp—way past the point where someone of Rodgers’s stature would be doing that to fake it.
“He’s been doing it,” Saleh says. “He jumps in there. I think he enjoys the scout team. He wants to be a part of it. He’s like a little kid out there. He just wants to be a part of it and have fun. He’s been doing it since Day 1. He’ll jump in with the O-line in pre-practice walkthrough; he’ll jump in to be the linebacker. I was actually messing with him. I said I’ve been coaching in the NFL for almost 20 years and I’ve never heard the fans celebrate a defensive play ever, until he got an interception.”
Why am I explaining this now, on the day after Rodgers tore his Achilles?
For two reasons. One, it explains why the Jets will leave the light on for Rodgers in 2024, with a roster that looked fast, aggressive and stacked on Monday night. And two, it shows how much Rodgers likes being on a team, and around football, which is a window into who he is and why he might not want the last night of his playing career to be Monday.
So maybe the Jets–Rodgers saga still has another chapter to it.
• The Jets’ brass will meet Tuesday to discuss options at quarterback. At the very least, they’ll probably have to add depth.
Certainly, it’d make sense for them to at least check in with Matt Ryan, Philip Rivers and even Tom Brady. I’d put all three in the unlikely category for right now. After that, you’re looking at guys such as Carson Wentz and Nick Foles, both of whom were with Jets GM Joe Douglas for a few years in Philadelphia.
That’s why the likelihood remains that Zach Wilson is the Jets’ quarterback. And at the very least, he’s a guy who’s experienced with the players around him, working with a coach—Nathaniel Hackett—who has a ton of experience working with young quarterbacks.
• Through Tua Tagovailoa’s ups and downs over the past couple years, one thing has been unwavering—what you’d hear about the quarterback out of the Dolphins locker room. And that never had much to do with whether or not he’d be good enough for Miami to pick up his fifth-year option, or give him the kind of monster extension his draft classmates Joe Burrow and Justin Herbert received from their teams.
Really, it’s about who he is as a worker, and a teammate, and that, as these guys see it, has shone especially bright as Tagovailoa went through what he did in 2022, as the general public litigated his future, and held his career up against a sport’s existential crisis.
“Yeah, I have so much respect for him for blocking out the noise,” Dolphins defensive end Jaelan Phillips told me Sunday night after the Dolphins’ 36–34 win over the Chargers. “It’s like, everybody has a say on his career. Everybody has opinions on him. And for him to shut it out and do what he does, it’s amazing. It’s exactly what you need from a leader. We’re super proud of him and wouldn’t have it any other way.”
It helps that he’s playing at a high level, of course, and it’s easy to forget—after how last year ended—that this has been going on for a while. In his first season under Mike McDaniel, he completed 65% of his throws for 3,548 yards, 25 touchdowns, eight picks and a 105.5 passer rating over 13 starts. On Sunday, he carried that over with a 466-yard, three-touchdown effort, through which he was clutch, aggressive and efficient.
The bottom line: He’s played really well since McDaniel arrived, and he’s done it, again, while all of us on the outside are arguing over what the guy should do with a career he’s spent his whole life pursuing. I, at the very least, can see where that’d be annoying. And so it’s not hard to see why people such as Phillips respect him so much.
• While we’re there, I did get Phillips’s take on where the Dolphins’ defense stands after its first game. On the surface, Vic Fangio’s debut as defensive coordinator didn’t go well.
The Chargers’ offense rolled to 433 yards from scrimmage, with 234 on the ground, and Justin Herbert’s passer rating was a hair under 100, and Kellen Moore’s unit wound up with points on six of its first nine possessions. But there was enough in that 10th possession to make you think that Fangio’s impact is coming.
The series started at the 25, and after a 10-yard gain, the Chargers had first-and-10 at the 35 with 1:38 left. On the first play, the Dolphins sent a fifth rusher, Justin Bethel, who forced Herbert to fade to his right, throw into a vacated area, and draw an intentional grounding penalty. On second-and-21, Fangio sent five rushers again, and Zach Seiler came free for a sack. On third-and-30, Miami rushed three, dropped eight, and were in position to get receiver Mike Williams to the ground quickly after an 18-yard reception.
Then came fourth-and-12. For the first time, maybe all day, Fangio rushed six. That generated a one-on-one for Phillips with right tackle Trey Pipkins III. Game over. And the key to the whole thing, as Phillips saw it, wasn’t just creating that matchup. It was that Miami gave Herbert nowhere to go—on any of those snaps.
“The key is to just not try to do too much,” Phillips says. “Obviously, when you’re rushing, you have to have rush-lane integrity. You can’t let him escape the pocket and do what he does best. I think that’s really what the conversation was. We all had ultimate faith in each other, and knew that we would be able to come up big in that moment because that’s what we do.”
And the way it all came together, as the Dolphins’ defenders saw it, was an example of where Fangio can take them.
“Our next step is to really become a lot more stout against the run, because at the end of the day, you have to earn the right to rush the passer,” Phillips continued. “I think that obviously morale-wise, everything is great, everybody has a lot of faith in him. We’re really excited for what he brings to the table.”
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• In the wake of Monday night, I really can’t handle the hard left turn so many folks took on Josh Allen.
First off, it’s not 2019 anymore. Allen has three years of top-five quarterback play on his résumé. He didn’t just arrive at that level. He’s been there. And in a case like this, where a guy stumbles out of the gate, leaning on history is just about always the right thing to do.
So if that’s our guide, there are a few facts to consider. He had two multi-interception games in 2020, four in ’21, and five in ’22. That’s not to excuse those. But it’s been part of the deal with him for a while and, yes, that even goes back to when Brian Daboll, who did a phenomenal job developing Allen, was with him. In fact, in Allen’s fourth-to-last game playing for Daboll, against Atlanta at the end of the ’21 season, he threw three picks.
Two weeks after that, he laid down the worst beating a Bill Belichick defense has ever taken in a playoff game. And the week after that was the epic shootout with Patrick Mahomes.
Again, no one’s excusing Monday night. But that was a damn good defense he was going against, he’s breaking in some new weapons, and it’s Week 1. He, and the Bills, are going to be fine.
• Chris Jones’s holdout is over—the Chiefs’ defensive tackle is signing a revised one-year deal with Kansas City that’ll get him in for the team’s final 16 regular-season games. And, in the end, it’s going to be tough for him to get to the point where this was all worth it.
Jones punted on a $500,000 workout bonus in the spring, incurred $2 million in training camp fines and forfeited a $1.08 million game check as part of all this, putting his losses at $3.58 million for the totality of the holdout. He comes out of it with the same base salary, minus what he lost with that game check, which takes his number from $19.5 million down to $18.42 million. The Chiefs, for their part, gave him $1 million incentives for playing in 35% of the defensive snaps and 50% of the defensive snaps, which is an easy way to try and reimburse him for the $2 million in fines.
That leaves $1.58 million in losses. He already had a $1.25 million incentive in his deal for hitting 10 sacks. That’s still there, with an extra $500,000 tacked on if he gets to 15 sacks. And there’s another $1 million if he’s first-team All-Pro and the Chiefs get back to the Super Bowl. That means, if you add it up, Jones could hit all those incentives, and still be $83,333 short of what he’d have made just by showing up to the offseason program, and for Week 1.
Which means to exceed what he’d have made without the holdout, he’ll have to hit the $2 million incentive for being Defensive Player of the Year and winning the Super Bowl.
For Jones, the holdout didn’t accomplish much. The good news? As far as I can tell, there’s no acrimony here. Jones stayed in Kansas City after attending the opener last Thursday, and will take a physical Tuesday to complete his new deal. Both he and the Chiefs remain amenable to doing another deal after this one, and keeping the star defensive tackle in Kansas City for the rest of his career.
• I know the coaching and scouting communities were hit hard a couple weeks back by the death of Gil Brandt—and Brandt had an impact on more people than most realize.
One of those people was Bill Belichick, and the Patriots’ coach was nice enough to send me a statement to honor his friend. Here it is: “Gil was a special friend over a good portion of my career. He was so knowledgeable, so insightful and had an incredible memory. He was one of the pioneers of scouting and team building and I always enjoyed our conversations. In the bigger picture, Gil made a huge impact on football fans throughout the USA and Canada. He made readers and listeners bigger and wiser football fans, and in turn, he did his part to grow the game.”
RIP, Gil.
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• We pretty much knew what Rodgers’s injury was last night—a torn Achilles is one of the easiest things for a doctor to identify in the moment on the field, and they’re rarely wrong in those instances. But now that the MRI has confirmed it, also confirmed is the Packers will get the Jets’ second-round pick, rather than their first-rounder, to complete the April trade (Rodgers had to play 65% of the Jets’ offensive snaps to make it a first).
That makes the final freight: Rodgers, the 15th pick last April (Will McDonald), and a 2023 fifth-rounder (traded for a sixth-rounder, Jarrick Bernard-Converse; and a seventh-rounder, Zack Kuntz), for the 12th pick last April (Lukas Van Ness), 2023 second- and sixth-rounders (Luke Musgrave and Anders Carlson), and a 2024 second-rounder.
• Watching some of it back, Philly rookie Jalen Carter was a problem for the Patriots—something folks there wound up echoing to me. If Carter can stay healthy, he will continue to be a problem for Eagles opponents.
• One last reminder—Week 1 is fool’s gold more often than you think. Unscouted looks everywhere, players in new places, teams at different stages of their development … So be careful with what you choose to believe this week.
