Nobody can question the talent and accolades of New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers. Over the course of his illustrious NFL career, Rodgers has won four regular season MVP's, been named to the Pro Bowl ten times, and brought Green Bay their fourth Super Bowl title in 2011. For his career, he's fifth in total passing touchdowns and ninth in passing yards. And despite all of this, for as skilled as Aaron Rodgers clearly is on the gridiron, it's not a stretch to say that he also may be the biggest headache of any historically great player in NFL history.
For now, let's just focus on the issues that Aaron Rodgers is creating on the field for the New York Jets, because the feathers that Rodgers has ruffled off the field is another story entirely — and one that we'll get to momentarily. Though it's still a month until the Jets begin training camp, Rodgers has been absent for much of the offseason thus far, including during mandatory minicamp, which wrapped up on June 13th. Former New England Patriots wide receiver and Super Bowl MVP Julian Edelman didn't pull any punches when discussing how it looks for Rodgers to be absent after playing only four snaps last season.
“I think it’s a bad look for your leader, for whatever reason, to go and miss [a mandatory minicamp],” Edelman told Colin Cowherd on Friday, per Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk. “I was with Tom Brady in his 25th year or 23rd year, and he started missing OTAs here and there, but he never missed a mandatory minicamp. I just thought it was a bad look. If I was in that locker room, and Aaron Rodgers wasn’t there for three days on the mandatory minicamp, having played four snaps off of an injury when we have two new receivers, a bunch of new linemen that we added to the team, with a CBA that doesn’t allow us to practice a lot, I guarantee there’s four or five guys — six, seven, eight, nine guys in that locker room — sitting there like, ‘Where’s he at?’”
Where Rodgers was at was on a vacation that he had reportedly planned months in advance. There's no word on whether this was a regular vacation or a darkness retreat, but one would think he probably could've scheduled this trip during a time that wouldn't have required him to rack up thousands of dollars worth of fines for missing out on the Jets offseason program.
Aaron Rodgers: The primary Jets distraction
Controversy seems to follow Aaron Rodgers wherever he goes. In January, Rodgers was involved in a nasty and public feud with late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel. In April, Rodgers was required to field questions and offer a denial when CNN reported that Rodgers had made claims in the past that the Sandy Hook school shooting did not happen, and was instead an inside job orchestrated by the U.S. government. This came just a month after Rodgers began openly weighing the possibility of stepping away from the Jets to be the Vice Presidential nominee alongside controversial independent candidate Robert Kennedy Jr.
Since then, Rodgers has continued to make podcast appearances and spout the kind of nonsense that comes only from those who A) Badly want attention, B) Desperately want to believe they are the smartest person in the room, or C) Both. All the while, he blatantly ignores the fact that he is the primary cause for the distractions in New York that he declared needed to be exorcised from the building back in January.
“Anything in this building that we're doing that has nothing to do with winning needs to be assessed,” Rodgers said, per Steve Gardner of USA Today. “Everything that we do has to have a purpose … the bulls*** that has nothing to do with winning has to get out of the building.”
Rodgers has used his weekly spot on the Pat McAfee Show to poke fun at Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, but instead of spending so much time criticizing Kelce for his partnership with Pfizer, maybe Aaron Rodgers should take some time to listen to the lead single off of the Midnights album of Kelce's girlfriend, Taylor Swift, and try to let her message sink in to his warped brain.
“It's me. Hi. I'm the problem, it's me.”
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