NFL: All-time great Aaron Rodgers’ key challenge at divisional doormat New York Jets

They have the longest playoff drought of any NFL, NBA or MLB team. They pulled off one of the biggest upsets of the 21st century — and cost themselves the No.1 pick in the draft (Trevor Lawrence). They have cycled through young quarterbacks who were supposed to be saviours and turned into flops.

Then they got Aaron Rodgers.

Ever since the 39-year-old quarterback emerged from a darkness retreat and decided that he wanted to leave the franchise he had spent his entire career with, the Green Bay Packers, for an NFL team in a constant state of rebuild, Jets fever has run rampant throughout the league. And Rodgers has embraced those expectations from the moment he entered the team’s facility.

“I noticed walking in this morning that the Super Bowl III trophy is looking a little lonely,” he said in April.

That fell a bit short of Joe Namath’s famous guarantee before the Jets’ lone Super Bowl win over a half-century ago, but that flood of optimism will be quickly put to the test: Beginning with Monday night’s game against the Buffalo Bills, the Jets have perhaps the NFL’s most brutal schedule to start the season.

The Rodgers effect is among the most profound in the sport’s recent history — the Jets’ leap in pre-season Super Bowl odds from 2022 to 2023 is one of the most dramatic jumps over the last decade. One of the few instances that surpasses it also arose from an all-time great quarterback changing teams: Tom Brady to the Buccaneers in 2020.

The question hanging over the Jets season is whether Rodgers can replicate Brady and win a championship in his new home or if Rodgers will more closely resemble the other ageing Packers legend who the Jets acquired. Brett Favre was also 39 years old when he played for the Jets in 2008, a season that began promising for New York before it crumbled down the stretch.

Like Brady, Rodgers is walking into what is set up to be an ideal situation. Last year, the Jets had a top-five defence in the league anchored by young players who only figure to improve. They boasted the offensive and defensive rookies of the year in cornerback Sauce Gardner and wide receiver Garrett Wilson, the latter of whom in his first season in the league outperformed every receiver Rodgers had in Green Bay last year. The team’s black hole was at quarterback — and Rodgers fills that.

It won’t take terribly long to determine whether the Jets’ experiment hums as well in reality as it appears on paper. That’s because the Jets don’t have a game that projects to be easy until December.

Six of the Jets first eight opponents — Buffalo, Dallas, Kansas City, Philadelphia, the New York Giants and the Chargers — were playoff teams last season, including the reigning champion Chiefs and the runner-up Eagles. The other two games are against the Denver Broncos, who with new coach Sean Payton are poised to rebound from a disastrous season, and the Patriots, who torment the Jets more routinely than New Englanders stop at Dunkin’ Donuts.

Much of the reason their schedule is so difficult is simple: the Jets play in what may turn out to be the NFL’s most difficult division.

Ever since Brady decamped from New England, the AFC East has belonged to Buffalo. The Bills, led by quarterback Josh Allen, have won 37 games over the last three seasons and won the division each time. The Patriots took a step back in 2022, missing the playoffs after reaching there in quarterback Mac Jones’s rookie 2021 season, but they still have the game’s most accomplished coach on the sidelines: Bill Belichick.

Then there are the Dolphins, another playoff team from last year. Miami was one of the most promising clubs in the league in 2022 until a series of scary head injuries to quarterback Tua Tagovailoa dampened the campaign.

The Jets have to play each of those teams two times, but the one thing that has changed the most is that they used to be the divisional doormat. Now they have Rodgers.

“We are in a really tough division, but they all have to play us too, so the mindset is always about us, it’s about what we can bring and it’s about whether they can stack up with us,” Jets coach Robert Saleh said. “Sounds cocky, I get it, but you can’t think of it any other way.”

The Jets haven’t won the division since 2002 or reached the playoffs at all since 2010. This time around, they have a four-time MVP at quarterback to try to remedy that.

When New York sent a collection of draft assets to Green Bay for Rodgers, whose frayed relationship with the Packers had reached a bitter end, the team was betting he could continue defying a normal ageing curve. He already did that with his former team: When Green Bay used a first-round pick on quarterback Jordan Love in 2020, Rodgers responded with back-to-back MVP seasons.

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In 2022, though, Rodgers’s play declined while the Packers missed the playoffs with a loss in the final game of the regular season. But he also lacked the same supporting cast he once had.

The Jets can seemingly offer just that. So they’re hoping the Rodgers of old can re-emerge to lead them through a torrid stretch — and establish that these aren’t the same old Jets.

— Wall Street Journal