Trying to talk about the New York Jets rationally

An exercise in trying to overcome your guttural feels

I need to present you with a stack of numbers and observations that I have no idea what to do about. These are things that paint the New York Jets favorably from people that I actually listen to.

DVOA projected the Jets in the FTN Almanac 2024 (on sale now!) to finish with 8.9 wins, giving them a 41% chance of being a playoff contender and a 15% chance of being a Super Bowl contender. Mike Clay, one of the sharpest and most hard-working guys in the industry, believes the Jets are going to win the Super Bowl. Nick Kostos, the You Better You Bet host who I think of as one of the absolute best in the betting field, says the Jets are the best value on the board for a Super Bowl run.

My problem: I have spent a lot of time following the New York Jets. I’m familiar with the New York Jets. With the advent of Aaron Rodgers, New York Jet, I am having trouble avoiding the New York Jets.

It’s not necessarily that the Jets have done bad things or that they have a bad roster, but my distrust comes from two real places. I a) am not believing a 41-year-old Aaron Rodgers who had started to slip in 2022 is actually going to be a star-level quarterback and b) do believe the Jets have collectively embraced a roster-building ethos that I would call “ring chasing” despite not ever winning more than seven games under their current head coach.

So you bring in Haason Reddick, who wants more money to play, then you don’t pay him, he never reports, and you look stupid. Maybe that gets solved before the season, but it didn’t got solved yet. Your starting left tackles the last two years will be Duane Brown (I love him, but not in his Age 38 season), and Tyron Smith (Age 34 season). You’re relying on a leap from Joe Tippmann and a healthy Alijah Vera-Tucker (something not seen since 2021) to have an even passable offensive line. The receiving corps is Mike Williams (off an ACL tear) and Allen Lazard (less said about his 2023 season the better) around all-world talent Garrett Wilson. And these guys barely get any time working with Rodgers while he loafs about missing preseason games and Being Vaguely Condescending As A General Rule whenever anyone talks to him. So we’re probably going to see a few early third-down throws sailed in the distance and arguments on the sideline.

Do I think Breece Hall is good? Yes. Do I think Sauce Gardner is good? Yes. Ditto Quinnen Williams. Jermaine Johnson looked like an easy edge winner last year. Their linebacking duo is extremely solid. The Jets have some incredible building blocks that any team would be lucky to have. But in capitulating to Rodgers to get him to agree to join the team, they’ve kind of absorbed his culture for better and worse. We didn’t get a chance to see him back up the ego last year, and now we’re running it back and his arm’s got to cash checks for the entire organization.

And do I trust a guy who walks and talks and acts like this? Not one iota. Not at 41 years old.

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Now as I’ve gotten deeper and deeper into what I guess I’ll call a sports watching career at this point, what I’ve come to understand is that my hottest takes often blow up in my face. Three real examples I remember: I was absolutely positive that the 49ers would crush the Ravens in the 2012 Super Bowl. I was absolutely positive that Tom Brady would take down the Broncos with then-noodlearmed Peyton Manning in the 2015 AFC Championship game. And, most recently, I was ready to write off Josh Allen after one season. I had huge pieces (and a radio interview for the 49ers one) on each of these takes where it is some of my most compelling and, I guess I’ll call it free-flowing, take-no-prisoners kind of work. Like, with the Allen bit, I wrote in Football Outsiders Almanac as if Sean McDermott had already been fired two years into the future. That kind of feeling yourself.

So whenever I come to a take that feels as guttural as this one, I get a little nervous now. And I try to seek out people I trust with the other opinion and force myself through their thinking. It’s not like I’d say the Jets literally can’t make the playoffs. It’s not like I’m holding the entire Jets history over their heads and denigrating them for that against what this is — the Aaron Rodgers Jets are a completely different era of football team for this organization.

But a Super Bowl contender? I can’t get there. So, so much has to go right. They may be starting a first-round rookie right tackle, but they are starting a rookie right tackle. I’m not swayed by the idea that Malachi Corley will instantly be anything more than a gadget player by his returns from camp and the preseason. Williams is the linchpin player of that supporting cast to me, and he literally just started practicing this week, two weeks before go. Then we have paired Rodgers with literally Nathaniel Hackett as his offensive coordinator, who was last seen creating an abysmal offense with the Jets last year and putting together one of the worst disappointments in the history of the NFL in 2022 with the Broncos.

Kostos puts it as asking yourself this question: How many teams in the NFL realistically, have it in their range of outcomes to win the Super Bowl? And I’m trying to create a world where that happens in my head, and to believe in that world to happen, I think I have to believe that 2021 Aaron Rodgers is here. I have enough faith in the defense having a superlative season that could propel them into contention, and I respect the argument that Breece Hall and Garrett Wilson are true stars at their positions, it’s just that I can’t name a single player other than that on the unit that I trust, nor can I trust the offensive coordinator to get the best out of anybody else on the team. And it’s not like Hall and Wilson weren’t great last year, so there’s not really hidden “upside” here — they both get drafted in the first 20 picks in every fantasy league. So it comes back to Rodgers.

The last franchise quarterback of old we did the He’ll Come Back From Injury Fine with was Rodgers’ opponent in the Super Bowl in 2010: Ben Roethlisberger. He missed almost the entirely of the 2019 season. He made it back for his age 38 season (notably not age 41) and had a respectable 3,803-yard season with 33 touchdowns and 10 picks, in line with his later prime years. If that happens to Rodgers in 2024, I think the Jets are a solid playoff team, but probably a team that needs to win two road games to win the Super Bowl unless a lot of other stuff goes right. Roethlisberger memorably threw two picks in the first 12 minutes of his first playoff game against the Browns at home, staking Cleveland to a 28-0 lead that cushioned them into the playoffs. He came back a shell of himself in 2021 before retiring.

Tom Brady did just fine bouncing back from a down year at this age, but he was also literally the most psychopathic overpreparer (complimentary) in NFL history. The Pat McAfee Headlines that Rodgers has generated along his path to New York alone tell you he doesn’t take this the same way. I don’t think it’s fair to believe that Rodgers’ beliefs alone make it impossible that he’s successful or anything like that — I’m not a fan, but there are plenty of sports players with political and personal values that I do not share — but it does concern me how they seem to have become as big a part of his life as actually playing football.

Maybe I’m wrong, and for the sake of Jets fans everywhere I hope I am. But … yeah. I’ve tried to listen to the positives on this team. I can see them in the playoffs. I just am having a hard time squaring everything I think would need to go right for them to be Super Bowl-bound in a probability analysis into more than a 1-2 percent chance. The coaching, the leaps forward from the young talent they need, the potential declines from their older players they must avoid. I find it hard to believe that this defense has yet another level up it can go.

Rodgers either needs to go back to his 2021 vintage in a snap of his fingers, or the Jets must have an incredible amount of their question marks come up in their favor. There’s really no other way around that to me when I try to come up with a ceiling case for this team to win the Super Bowl.