Twice on the New York Jets’ final offensive drive Sunday, Aaron Rodgers and his wide receivers appeared to be on different pages. While this is not uncommon—in an NFL game where a team is attempting 25 to 35 passes, seeing a coverage or interpreting a hand gesture or signal differently is understandable—it becomes less tolerable as the season wears on. This is especially true when your roster came pre-baked full of veterans and is quarterbacked by a talented but notoriously mercurial quadragenarian with a famous impatience for people not understanding his every gesture.
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Rodgers took a frustrated swing at the air when he skied a ball over the head of Garrett Wilson after Wilson had cooked his defender on a double move. Like nearly all of the snaps Sunday, Rodgers was under pressure, but this looked like the combination of coverage, call and receiver the Jets had been searching for to punch in a game-winning touchdown. Rodgers and offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett, who worked together in Green Bay, often view game plans as a developing story. The plays they run at all points of the game have the intent of eventually prying open and setting up knockout blows. In this way, Rodgers punching thin air was an appropriate metaphor for a missed opportunity.
On the final play of the game, Rodgers lofted a ball to Mike Williams that was intercepted by Stephon Gilmore. Rodgers let go of the ball quickly, giving Williams time and space to use his body and clear out room for a catch (in the postgame press conference, Rodgers called it an underthrow and placed the blame squarely on his shoulders). But as disaffected Green Bay Packers fans almost surely, instantly recognized, Williams never turned around for the ball. Gilmore had time to adjust, position himself and secure the game-ending pick. Williams, at the least, missed an opportunity to dive for a pass interference.
To be clear, this is not to suggest Wilson or Williams were wrong by any stretch. Rodgers was as self-critical after this loss at the podium as we’ve heard him be all season and admitted that he was playing the game with a low-ankle sprain after momentarily leaving the field to get checked out by the medical staff. The way they understood both of these moments may have been perfectly reasonable.
But, with the Las Vegas Raiders’ Davante Adams available for trade, the Jets’ season slowly veering toward a classic New York market meltdown told through tabloid headlines and the proliferation of disgruntled, oft-dissected press conferences, there is no more time for this team to wait. The Jets need to trade for Rodgers’s former favorite target now, and failing to do so will only cement the disaster scenario every Jets fan quietly feared when Rodgers signed in the first place.
Again, this is not passing blame to the wide receiving corps or saying they are not good enough. We all know that playing for Rodgers is like learning Mandarin after being dropped off via helicopter in mainland China. And a quarterback with two decades of experience will inevitably see and interpret coverages and situations differently than wide receivers who came up through a far more streamlined and simplistic age of offense, where a lot of the thinking has been removed from the equation.
Like any relationship, this one is going to take time and patience. Unfortunately for the Jets, the terms of this relationship are more like the ones outlined in 90 Day Fiancé or Married at First Sight instead of a traditional marriage where there is time and space to grow.
My guess is that the last thing GM Joe Douglas wants to do is simply smash more veterans into the fold, potentially causing Wilson to become disillusioned and the offense to turn into a two-man show. That said, Douglas knew exactly what he was getting himself into when he signed Rodgers. He also knew that Adams had signed a long-term deal with the perpetually nonsensical Las Vegas Raiders and it was only a matter of time before Adams’s desperation to abscond met the Jets’ desperation to make the Rodgers experiment seem like a success.
There is no getting off the ride now. There is only what makes sense amid this frantic blur. Common sense was hurled out the window long ago, and at this point, the Jets had better enjoy—and master—the feeling of flying down a mountain road with their brake lines cut. Adams is not the salve that will fix all wounds and, certainly, sacrificing mid-round picks and possible valued members of the roster is not something done in the best interest of the roster’s long-term health. Of course, all of the health the Jets imagined would blossom from the Rodgers experiment—the simultaneous development of Zach Wilson, the bolstering of Wilson and Breece Hall and the removal of day-to-day chaos from the notoriously batty Florham Park—have long been abandoned.
The decision now becomes what is less unhealthy: allowing Rodgers to carry on, missing receivers and hoping that at some point everyone magically gets on the same page before the season slips away? Or, pacifying the man you signed up to pacify regardless of circumstance; keeping Rodgers from having any reason to punch the air in frustration, and keeping your fan base from giving up before you do.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as The Jets Need to Trade for Davante Adams Now.
