Jets Q&A: How did Aaron Rodgers look? What did Robert Saleh say?
How did Aaron Rodgers look in his return to MetLife?
Pretty stinking good, actually.
Rodgers moved quickly on his crutches and was wearing what looked to be a stiff ankle brace on his surgically repaired Achilles. Before the game, he spoke with Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce and watched his team during warmups before retiring to a suite. He also addressed the Jets the night before the game.
"He just came into the team room like Batman," wide receiver Allen Lazard said. "It was a Hollywood-esque moment of Aaron Rodgers appearing, walking. I thought he was about to fly, quite honestly."
The news got even better when NBC’s Melissa Stark revealed during the broadcast that Rodgers intends to return to the sideline in a few weeks. “His plan is to rejoin the team permanently after their Week 7 bye. And he told me his goal is to play again this season,” she said.
What did Robert Saleh say to the officials that earned him an unsportsmanlike-conduct penalty near the end of the game?
We don’t know exactly, but it’s probably not printable.
Saleh declined to reveal what he said, but he was seen gesturing and yelling at officials. He acknowledged that it stemmed from two questionable holding penalties.
A ticky-tacky holding call on Sauce Gardner with 4:29 left in the fourth quarter negated Michael Carter II’s interception and essentially sealed the Jets’ loss. A few plays before that, with Kansas City facing third-and-23, Mahomes scrambled for 25 yards and the Jets' C.J. Mosley was dinged for illegal contact even though teammate Jermaine Johnson clearly was being held. That tacked on five more yards and Kansas City was given a first down at the Jets' 30, stalling a comeback attempt.
“You can’t control it,” Saleh said. “You wish you could. You wish you could hit the replay button. You wish you could do anything, but you can’t, so you’ve got to focus on the moment. You’ve got to stay in it . . . It was extremely unfortunate, especially for prime-time football.”
What did Gardner think of the call against him?
He thought it was bogus.
“The receiver ran into me,” he said. “It was a collision. It’s the same thing that was happening all game and they’d thrown no flags . . . Me personally, that’s like when you play basketball one-on-one and you go up to lay the ball up and you wait to see, you miss, and then say foul. I can’t believe that. That was just crazy because . . . they get bailed out like that, fourth quarter, crunchtime. That’s — I don’t even know what to say.”
Was this game a turning point for Zach Wilson?
It sure looked like it — and the Jets certainly seemed to think it was.
He outplayed Mahomes, going 28-for-39 for 245 yards and two touchdowns in his best performance as a Jet. Afterward, he got praised not only for his play but for his willingness to hold himself accountable for a big fourth-quarter fumble.
“He went out there and had a phenomenal game — one of the best games I’ve seen him play here, so I’m proud of that,” center Connor McGovern said. “It just shows his resilience. It shows his maturity. It shows the growth that he’s had over the last year . . . Everybody in the locker room, we trust him. We know he has the ability. We’ve all seen his ability to do it.”
So Wilson must’ve been mostly pleased, right?
Not quite. Afterward, he took full responsibility for the loss — the result, he said, of him fumbling a snap near midfield on second-and-9 at Kansas City’s 49 with 7:30 left in the game. Kansas City recovered and ran out the clock, and Wilson was spotted on the sideline saying that he lost the game.
“It’s on me,” he said. “A critical situation and I can’t have a play like that. I cannot drop the ball. This team is sacrificing a lot . . . I lost us that game and I cannot do that. I’m just making it clear to those guys that I need to be better.”
Laura Albanese is a reporter, feature writer and columnist covering local professional sports teams; she began at Newsday in 2007 as an intern.
