Editor’s note: On Tuesday morning, an MRI confirmed that Aaron Rodgers suffered a torn Achilles tendon. The injury will end Rodgers’s season.
Before Monday Night Football, ESPN aired a segment in which tennis legend John McEnroe interviewed Aaron Rodgers, the New York Jets’ new quarterback. The interview was charming, but as Rodgers repeatedly talked about winning the Super Bowl, McEnroe, a diehard Jets fan, kept squirming in his seat. Clearly scarred by the past 50 years of his Jets fandom, McEnroe was so visibly uncomfortable with Rodgers discussing a championship that Rodgers called out McEnroe’s pessimism.
“You’re a Jets fan!” Rodgers said.
“Exactly,” McEnroe said.
Rodgers rejected New York’s negativity and preached how he believed in manifesting what is in your heart. Rodgers sounded like Ted Lasso, if Ted Lasso took (more) hallucinogens and subscribed to Joe Rogan’s podcast.
“Once we start believing and start playing the right way, you’ll see everyone else like yourself start believing,” Rodgers said. “And you won’t be saying shit like ‘What if it doesn’t go right?’ And then when everybody else is believing in this city, there is a never-ending unstoppable wave of positivity and energy that we’re going to take all the way.”
As if to emphasize Rodgers’s point, a storm swirled over the stadium before the game. Fans were warned to shelter in place two hours before kickoff. But as kickoff approached, the clouds were replaced by a double rainbow. It was as if the heavens themselves were pleading with Jets fans to believe.
But rainbows are tricks of the light. In the most Jets thing that has ever Jets’ed in the history of the Jets, Rodgers was injured four plays into his New York career. While the severity of the injury has yet to be confirmed, pending an MRI on Tuesday, Jets head coach Robert Saleh confirmed after the game that they fear Rodgers suffered an Achilles injury, which could be not only season-ending but could be career-threatening for a quarterback who will turn 40 later this year. As the fans say in Ted Lasso, it’s the hope that kills you.
But in the least Jets thing that has happened since Joe Namath guaranteed and delivered a Super Bowl III victory (another guy who believed in speaking positivity into existence), the Jets ended up beating the three-time defending AFC East division champ Buffalo Bills anyway. At the risk of being caught in the moment, it feels fair to say this might go down as the single wildest game of this season.
Jets safety Jordan Whitehead, who had never intercepted more than two passes in a season, caught three in this game. Breece Hall, the second-year running back coming off a torn ACL, had 109 yards on his first two carries. Zach Wilson, the quarterback who was benched and dismissed after losing games and the locker room, returned to throw the game-tying touchdown pass. And star receiver Garrett Wilson delivered the best touchdown catch of the new season, juggling the ball to himself, holding the Jets’ souls in the balance.
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Saleh, inspired to enter coaching because of 9/11 and now coaching the Jets 22 years later on the anniversary, decided to go for it on fourth-and-1 at the end of the game rather than kick a field goal to take the lead. And after the Bills tied the game with a doinked-in field goal and won the toss in overtime, Jets rookie receiver Xavier Gipson—who Hard Knocks viewers saw being pranked by GM Joe Douglas before being told he’d made the team—returned a punt for just the third game-winning walk-off punt return touchdown on record.
“In my mind,” Gipson said to ESPN’s Lisa Salters after the game, “I was thinking, ‘Let’s win this game for A-Rod.’”
Rodgers played just four snaps, but he may have already delivered on exactly what he said would happen: The players would believe in themselves, and then they’d convince the city to believe in the players. It is not easy to find a way to describe a moment as electric as what happened Monday night in the Meadowlands. But one phrase that comes to mind is a “never-ending unstoppable wave of positivity and energy.” Rodgers started that wave, but now it seems it will be up to the Jets to figure out how far they can ride it, likely without him.
Jets fans—and I hope I am not insulting you—are all a little dead inside. That’s what happens when you go a half century without a Super Bowl appearance or a 4,000-yard passer. This offseason, though, Rodgers made them all feel alive.
His Jets debut on Monday felt like an event. Fans were given wristbands with green and white LED lights that flashed during AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.” Rodgers carried an American flag as he led the Jets out of the tunnel. Jets superfan Fireman Ed unleashed bloodthirsty screams. Multiple Jets beat reporters tweeted that they had never felt such energy at a sporting event, let alone a Jets game.
But four snaps, one pass attempt, a sack, and a cart ride to the locker room later, Rodgers might be done for the season. For a fan base who usually protects itself from hope, it was devastating. It’s like Charlie Brown swearing off kicking, getting convinced to go for his biggest kick ever, and then seeing Lucy pull the ball back one last time. It’s only natural for Charlie Brown to blame himself. The air didn’t go out of the stadium as much as the air went through the stadium—the feeling of more than 83,000 Jets fans sighing, saying they should have known better.
Within 20 minutes of Rodgers’s injury, McEnroe was on ESPN’s ManningCast, speaking unofficially on behalf of Jets Nation. “You can’t make this up,” McEnroe said. “This is beyond belief.”
The irony is that something as devastating as Rodgers getting hurt is too believable for this star-crossed franchise. The Jets currently have the longest postseason drought in major American pro sports. They have the worst record in the NFL since 2017. That is true despite the Browns going 0-16 and the Jaguars being so bad that they got the no. 1 pick in back-to-back drafts during that span. Jets fans have watched their team settle for Zach Wilson instead of Trevor Lawrence after losing out on the top pick, only for Wilson to be outplayed by career backup Mike White. They’ve seen Sam Darnold seeing ghosts, and lived through the Butt Fumble. Go back even further, and there’s New York taking Ken O’Brien in 1983 instead of Dan Marino, who landed with the division-rival Dolphins. Bill Belichick accepted the Jets head-coaching job, only to resign before his opening press conference and go to New England. It was a Jets linebacker that hit Patriots quarterback Drew Bledsoe so hard that Tom Brady became New England’s starting quarterback and went on to own the division for two decades. Jets fans have had more stomach-churning moments than that actual jet that was grounded because someone had diarrhea.
And as if being a Jets fan isn’t enough, there isn’t much to turn to if they’re looking for hope elsewhere in the New York sports landscape. The Yankees are in last place with the second-biggest payroll in baseball. The Mets, who entered the season with the largest Opening Day payroll in MLB history, are flirting with last place and already traded away their star veteran additions, Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer. The Brooklyn Nets’ attempt to win big by signing star veterans failed, as the team bailed on both Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving by February. And just this past Sunday night, New York City’s other NFL team, the Giants, lost to Dallas 40-0, which was not actually a tennis score.
For long-suffering Jets fans, it would be understandable that after watching Rodgers get immediately hurt on the MetLife Stadium turf, they decided it was all just too much and swore off football—and hope—forever.
But then a funny thing happened: The Jets wouldn’t go away, and neither did the belief. The Jets defense was pristine. Just as Jets fans were surely admonishing themselves for ever believing in this team, they were rewarded. And as if this weren’t enough of a Ted Lasso script, Zach Wilson said after the game that he went into the locker room at halftime and told Aaron Rodgers he loved him.
The drunkenness over this win will become quite the hangover by Tuesday morning. Saleh has already indicated that Wilson would be “the guy” to replace Rodgers—but it’s fair to wonder whether the Jets might need to make another quarterback move to give themselves a potentially better option. Carson Wentz is a free agent and is, uh, you know what? Never mind. Could Tom Brady come out of retirement to play for the Jets? (And how much practice would Brady really need to be a better option than Zach Wilson?) Those questions will be answered in due time, but short of Brady, nobody available is going to bring the gravitas and excitement to keep that familiar football darkness from creeping back into Jets fans’ hearts. This Jets team looks good enough to win a championship. That is what makes this Rodgers injury so cruel.
As Gipson ran into the end zone, the Jets acted like they had won the Super Bowl. Players hugged and screamed. The lights at MetLife Stadium dimmed. The green lights of Jets fans once again illuminated the stadium. “Feels like I’m dreaming,” Gipson said after the game. That is what the Rodgers era may be for the Jets—a dream they were awoken from before it could finish.
