Aaron Rodgers just completed his second Hail Mary in 24 hours. The New York Jets have traded for star receiver Davante Adams, sending a conditional third-round pick back to the Las Vegas Raiders (the pick becomes a second-rounder if Adams is named to an All-Pro team or is on the active roster for the Jets late into the playoffs this season). It is a desperate move for a desperate team that fired head coach Robert Saleh just seven days ago and fell to 2-4 on the season Monday night after a 23-20 loss to the Buffalo Bills.
Desperate or not, though, the Jets are already so deep into the Rodgers experience that this deal makes sense. New York seems to be heeding Mike’s advice in Breaking Bad: No half measures, Walter. The Jets were already all in on Rodgers, the quarterback, but now, after Rodgers successfully lobbied to get Adams on the team (and after bringing in Nathaniel Hackett and Allen Lazard when he first came to New York), he appears to be judge, jury, and general manager too.
While Tuesday morning’s trade felt like a direct reaction to Monday night’s loss, Adams was apparently already in New York early Tuesday, and the NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport reported that the deal was agreed to on Monday.
Had New York beaten Buffalo on Monday, the Jets would have somehow—despite their contentious start to the season—been in first place in the AFC East. Instead, they missed two field goals, went 1-for-4 in the red zone, and had a number of miscommunications and blown opportunities in a sloppy debacle that featured more than 20 total penalties called. The loss dropped the Jets to 2-4, just one game better than the New England Patriots, who are probably the worst team in the NFL. “Some games you win in the NFL, and some games you give away,” Rodgers said at his postgame press conference. “This was a giveaway.”
The trade for Adams comes after two straight games in which late interceptions—both intended for Mike Williams—potentially cost the Jets wins. Against the Vikings two weeks ago, the Jets were down six points and were nearing the red zone with under a minute to go. Rodgers threw a ball to Williams along the sideline expecting that Williams would turn around. He kept running, and the ball was intercepted. Then, on a third-and-16 Monday night just before the two-minute warning, Rodgers threw a ball toward Williams that was instead picked off spectacularly by Bills defensive back Taron Johnson.
After the game, Rodgers was asked what happened on the play. And for the first time in recorded human history, an athlete actually explained what happened in full detail:
“[The play] is two verticals. Allen [Lazard] is down the seam, Mike is down the red line. So I’m looking at Allen, he puts his hand up, three guys go with him, so I’m throwing a no-look to the red line. And when I peek my eyes back there, he’s running an [in-breaking route]. It’s gotta be down the red line.”
In a follow-up, Rodgers was asked whether he was throwing the ball for Williams to come back to. “No,” Rodgers said. “I was throwing it to the red line, but I got to about here [Rodgers mimics being halfway through his throwing motion] and I kind of adjusted a little bit. But the play is two guys vertical. One guy down the seam, one guy on the red line.”
These types of incidents have been happening for the Jets all season, and they seem like the final motivating factors in New York’s trade for Adams. You could see the frustration on Rodgers’s face in his press conference. You could see the disbelief on the sideline after the play.
So far, this Jets season—and particularly this loss and the one to the Vikings in London—has been defined by guys making mistakes. As ESPN’s Dan Orlovsky broke down last week, that London loss featured a litany of offensive errors: Garrett Wilson ran a different route than Rodgers expected multiple times. Wilson also took a screen in the wrong direction and gained 4 yards when he probably could have gotten 40. Lazard dropped a ball. Braelon Allen dropped a screen. Multiple defenders went unblocked by the offensive line.
The Jets played better against Buffalo, but they were still undone by self-inflicted errors: Allen scored a go-ahead touchdown that got wiped away by a (questionable) Tyron Smith hold. Breece Hall took a long run inside the 5-yard line, but the Jets couldn’t find the end zone. The late interception merely solidified the urgency of the moment and made the theme of this Jets season clear: Rodgers does not seem to trust his teammates to be where he expects them to be on the field. And so the Jets are trading for the receiver Rodgers trusts more than anyone.
The Rodgers-Adams connection was sensational in Green Bay. A key part of Rodgers’s back-to-back MVP awards in 2020 and 2021 was that Adams hauled in 29 touchdowns and nearly 3,000 receiving yards over those two seasons. Adams was the focal point of almost every Packers play, and Green Bay’s offense relied on the fact that Rodgers and Adams knew every step the other would take in any situation. Like Will Ferrell and Jon Heder in Blades of Glory, the two were essentially pairs skaters performing a flip where one wrong kick could slit the other’s throat, but done right would earn them a perfect score. The Rodgers offense is the Iron Lotus, and any receiver who can’t run routes as he likes them … well.
In talking about the Adams trade at an NFL owners meeting Tuesday, Jets owner Woody Johnson referenced a different Will Ferrell movie. Asked what he thought about the trade turning the season around, Johnson said: “Thinking is overrated. You have to look forward to the games we’re playing each and every week and try to win all of them. Talladega Nights, you’ve heard of that? Remember that one scene [Susan] says, ‘[Ricky], you’re not a thinker, you’re a driver!’ A lot of times you have to go with your instinct and build a winning team and most importantly build a culture of winning.”
To say nothing of “thinking is overrated,” it’s too perfect for the owner of the New York Jets to talk about a “culture of winning” by referencing a movie whose tagline is, “If you ain’t first, you’re last.” The Jets have redefined last place over the last 50 years. The Jets have won the fifth-most AFC East division titles. There are only four teams in the AFC East.
With the Jets, Adams might be options A, B, and C. In Green Bay, Adams was Rodgers’s primary target on four out of every five pass designs. And while Adams hasn’t been as notable a name around the NFL during his time in Las Vegas, he has still managed to put up numbers. In two full seasons with the Raiders, he had 203 catches for 2,660 yards and 22 touchdowns. This season—with Gardner Minshew and Aidan O’Connell at the helm—has unsurprisingly been brutal, but Adams still has the speed, separation ability, and savvy to be a game-breaking player, and potentially a season-saving one. Adams will not help the Jets learn their blocking assignments or get Hall to finish touchdown runs or cut down on holding penalties. But he will be where Rodgers expects him to be, which is half the battle. Lazard, too, seems to fill that role on this team. And now Wilson, instead of being doubled on every play, will become an outrageously overqualified no. 2 option. Adams, Wilson, and Lazard as the Jets’ three receivers, plus Hall at running back, easily adds up to be the best receiving group in the NFL. Now the offense just needs to find its rhythm, and Rodgers and Adams need to shake off any rust.
This trade is the result of two owners who are in too deep. The Raiders got into the Adams business in the first place because Mark Davis hired Josh McDaniels in 2022 under the auspices that, if McDaniels got the job, he’d make the Raiders good enough to beat the Chiefs. Lol. McDaniels, realizing he had talked his way into the job and now needed to deliver, made the bizarre decision to trade a first- and a second-rounder to Green Bay for Adams. The deal made sense only on the timeline that McDaniels had pitched in his job interview, and it worked out about how you’d expect: Raiders players were smoking cigars in the locker room to celebrate the firing of McDaniels in the middle of the 2023 season. Then came the revolving quarterback door of Jimmy Garoppolo, Minshew, and O’Connell, and after a 1-2 start this season, Adams made what head coach Antonio Pierce might call a “business decision” to sit with a hamstring injury until he was traded. Now that’s happened, and in return, the Raiders get a conditional third, completing the latest disastrous arc for a disastrous franchise.
The Jets are not as pathetic as the Raiders right now, but they are thirstier. New York is tied for the longest postseason drought in all of men’s pro sports at 13 years (even laughingstocks like the Oakland A’s and Chicago White Sox were in the playoffs just a few years ago). For all the rational reasons there were for the Jets to fire Saleh last week—his 20-36 record didn’t help—the timing was still surprising. There was little to indicate that firing Saleh would fix anything this year. Instead, as former Jets coach Eric Mangini said ahead of the London game: “Woody Johnson, the 66th ambassador to the U.K. All of his buddies are gonna be over there and after the game when he’s eating tea and crumpets, he’s gonna be wanting to talk about his team and how successful they are. Not only that, you’ve got the former first-round draft pick [Sam Darnold] playing against you and playing really well and you’ve got a 40-year-old quarterback.”
The Jets lost that game, and Johnson fired Saleh two days later. As Bill Belichick gleefully noted on Monday night’s ManningCast, Saleh inherited the league’s worst defense when he was hired in 2021 and he turned it into one of the league’s best. “That’s kind of what it’s been like there at the Jets,” Belichick said. “They’ve barely won 30 percent of their games in the last 10 years. The owner being the owner, just ready, fire, aim.”
This Adams trade, too, seems a bit like ready, fire, aim. But the Jets are so deep into this plan that they have no other way out. The franchise has never had a 4,000-yard passer and hasn’t seen the Super Bowl since the moon landing (though Rodgers might dispute that statement). Rodgers was supposed to be the shortcut to fixing that. Abandoning the plan this far in is not tenable. It makes more sense to give Rodgers more control, more power, because he does have some magic left, as that halftime Hail Mary to Lazard showed on Monday night.
It’s hard not to view this Adams trade as the transaction equivalent of that Hail Mary: an absolutely stunning move that few thought Rodgers could pull off—but one that isn’t guaranteed to change the team’s fortunes. Rodgers’s prayers have been answered for the second day in a row, but we still don’t know exactly how many Hail Marys you need to save the Jets.
