For Jets and Aaron Rodgers, it's Super Bowl or bust
The Packers' Aaron Rodgers salutes the fans after an NFL game against the Bears on Dec. 4, 2022, in Chicago. Credit: AP/Charles Rex Arbogast
There is but one way Aaron Rodgers will be worth what the Jets have given up in acquiring him.
One win next February.
One trophy to add to the sparse collection in the case on Jets Drive.
One season during which the team, for what might be the first time in its history, begins a year with high expectations and dreamy optimism, carries that heavy load all the way through the autumn and early winter, then delivers on the lofty promises it made when news of the trade broke on an afternoon in late April.
Accomplish that, and this swap becomes a steal for the Jets.
Fall short of that, and it becomes just the latest misstep by management in a streak of them that goes back more than half a century, another boneheaded get-rich-quick scheme that would make Ralph Kramden shake his head and wonder if the Jets will ever reach — never mind win — a second Super Bowl.
Those are the stakes Woody Johnson, Joe Douglas and Robert Saleh understood when they embarked on this journey months ago, when they began to wonder aloud — first to each other, then in hushed tones within league circles — if Rodgers was gettable.
Before they negotiated anything with the Packers, they first had to come to terms with their own desires and aspirations to determine what they were willing to cede to bring a Hall of Fame quarterback to a roster they believed was one very key position player away from a championship.
That inner conversation wasn’t about future draft picks. It was about defining their careers and their legacies, about giving up a level of autonomy in the running of the organization and shaping it around an outsider, about what it can cost to achieve true greatness and local football immortality . . . but also the repercussions of swinging that hard and coming up short of it.
Once that decision was made, engineering the trade with the Packers was the easy part. By the time Douglas reached the table and began actually negotiating with Green Bay general manager Brian Gutekunst, the Jets already had made it clear what they were willing to pay for Rodgers.
Everything.
It’s not as loopy an idea as it sounds. Two of the last three Super Bowl champions have followed the same course to their dreams.
The Buccaneers had a middling team, added Tom Brady and a few of his pals, and presto, a Lombardi Trophy was being tossed between boats on Tampa Bay. The Rams had a self-imposed deadline to win a Super Bowl they were scheduled to host, so they plucked Matthew Stafford from Detroit, went all-in with free-agent signings, and poof, had themselves a Hollywood ending.
A look at the current status of each of those teams now, of course, can make an onlooker wonder if it was worth it.
Newsflash: It was.
And it will be for the Jets, too, if it brings them to the same destination.
The Jets had a better roster than the Bucs or the Rams had before they made their definitive moves at quarterback. Now that they have Rodgers, they have one of the most impressive collections of talent in the league.
They are legitimate contenders, even in a division that until this past weekend had two teams in stronger position than they were (plus a third that they have never quite been able to surmount), even in a conference that has the best quarterback in the game playing in Kansas City.
Right now, though, that’s all this trade has bought the Jets.
They are intriguing.
They are promising.
They have potential.
Those are all things they have had in the past, though. Trading future draft picks — never mind their souls — for that status would be a mistake of epic proportions. It’s why there were many on social media Monday who looked at the terms and reflexively called it a fleecing by the Packers, a bad loss by the Jets.
But they didn’t give up those picks for Rodgers. They didn’t sign the receivers and the offensive coordinator for Rodgers. The Jets did all of that because they want to win a Super Bowl. Not in 2025 or 2026 or any other time in the future. They made the trade to win it this coming season.
If that’s what they wind up with, April 24, 2023, will be remembered as the greatest offseason day in Jets history.
If they don’t, they’ll have lost more than the trade.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
