Last week, former Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers told the world about the way the team treated him on the way out the door. Former Jets (and now Rams) receiver Davante Adams already knew about it.
“We golfed together on a Wednesday [Feb. 5] in Vegas, at Shadow Creek, and then [Rodgers] told me he was going to [meet with the Jets] on Thursday [Feb. 6] and then come back and we’d play again Friday,” Adams recently told Mike Silver of TheAthletic.com. “And he was just in such a bad mood [after the meeting] that he hit me up and was like, ‘I’m not coming back, bro.’ He’s like, ‘This was horrible; they just disrespected me completely.’”
Adams’s first reaction was to regard it as an exaggeration.
“I thought he was being a little dramatic at first,” Adams told Silver. “I’m like, ‘Bro, don’t paraphrase it. How did he say this?’ [But] that’s how he said it. And I was shocked because I didn’t think anybody had the balls to, for lack of better words, to hit him with it like that. Just flat out — ‘Yeah, I think we’re just gonna do something different. We’re gonna move in a different direction.’ It was shocking, but right from that moment, I knew there was no chance that I’d be back there.”
Adams wouldn’t have been staying with the Jets without a drastically revised contract. His salary was due to mushroom in 2025, as part of the effort to bump up the APY on his five-year deal with the Raiders. With Rodgers leaving, there wouldn’t have been a reason to keep Rodger’s close friend.
The Jets haven’t, and won’t, engage in a pissing match with Rodgers over whether the meeting went the way he claims. There’s nothing to be gained by wrestling in the mud with Rodgers.
Besides, his whining about it helped prove their point that it’s now about the J-E-T-S, not man who used to play Q-B there.
Aaron Rodgers shared his displeasure with how the Jets handled his release from the team last week, but the Jets aren’t interested in slinging any mud back in his direction.
Rodgers complained that he paid for a flight for a meeting with new Jets head coach Aaron Glenn and General Manager Darren Mougey that ended after 15 minutes with the team telling him they were not interested in continuing their relationship. Rodgers said the approach lacked an “ample amount of respect” and referred to the Jets as a “debacle” during an appearance on The Pat McAfee Show.
Mougey was asked about Rodgers’s comments during a Monday press conference. Mougey said he addressed the team’s decision to move on without Rodgers during the Scouting Combine and had nothing else to add to the conversation.
“I understand the question, but I’m just going to talk about the draft and current Jets players,” Mougey said.
Glenn will likely get asked about Rodgers when he speaks to the media during the draft, but there’s little reason to think that the new regime is going to change its tune when it comes to a player they didn’t have anything to do with acquiring in the first place.
The Jets had three first-round draft picks in 2022, and they’re committing to all three of them at least through 2026.
Jets General Manager Darren Mougey said today that the team will exercise fifth-year options on 2022 fourth overall pick Sauce Gardner, 10th overall pick Garrett Wilson and 26th overall pick Jermaine Johnson II.
That means Gardner gets a guaranteed base salary of $20.1 million in 2026, Wilson gets a guaranteed $16.8 million and Johnson gets a guaranteed $13.4 million.
That’s a lot to guarantee three players, but the Jets are lacking in talent, and hitting on their three first-round picks in 2022 was one of the few things they’ve done right in the personnel department in recent years. So they don’t want to let any of those three players go.
The Jets will likely try to negotiate long-term contract extensions with Gardner, Wilson and Johnson, but even without any additional negotiations, they’ll all be with the Jets for two more years.
The draft is the biggest event on the NFL calendar this week, but it’s not the only business being conducted around the league.
Offseason programs have gotten underway for the seven teams that hired new head coaches and the other 25 teams will be up and running by Tuesday. Some of the teams with new coaches will also be moving into another stage of their work.
The Bears, Jaguars, Raiders, and Jets will all open three day minicamps on Monday. The minicamps are voluntary and teams with new head coaches must run them before the draft. The Patriots will also hold a minicamp this week, but it will start on Tuesday.
All five teams opened their offseason work a couple of weeks ago and the minicamps will allow them to start the transition from doing only meetings and conditioning work to more of the on-field work that they hope will prepare them for better results in 2025.
Three days ago, former Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers unloaded regarding the team’s decision to offload the future Hall of Famer. Since then, the Jets haven’t uttered a peep.
Not a word, directly or indirectly. On any of the various subjects Rodgers addressed or claims he made — including that the Jets have been a “debacle” and that new coach Aaron Glenn went “rogue” in abruptly telling Rodgers after he flew cross country “on my own dime” that he’d be getting no more dollars from the Jets.
Some would regard silence as confirmation of Rodgers’s claims. Judged against the standard established by past Jets regimes, that would likely be true. The best sign that the team is changing under Glenn and G.M. Darren Mougey is that they exercised restraint in the face of Rodgers’s grievances.
Nothing said in response to Rodgers will change a thing. It won’t help the team win games in 2025, or beyond. It would only invite more noise from Rodgers, who now has a clear interest in seeing the Jets do worse without him than last year’s 5-12 record with him. (Any former teammates who choose to keep in contact with Rodgers should keep that in mind when he criticizes Glenn or Mougey.)
The Jets gain nothing from getting into a pissing contest with someone who always finds a way to paint himself as the victim. They gain everything by continuing to implement their plan to move on.
This week, Glenn and Mougey will be available to reporters during the draft. Don’t be surprised if they shoot down any questions about Rodgers by saying they’ll only be talking about the players who are currently on the team.
If they choose to say anything, however, we suggest something along the lines of what 60 Minutes said after Rodgers bristled at the suggestion in a profile that he’s overly sensitive: “It was fair and accurate and it was obvious we got it right when we reported that he tends to be overly sensitive.”
Rodgers’s pettiness on the back end of being released by the Jets makes it obvious they got it right to clear out someone who would undermine Glenn’s team-first approach. And it should be a warning to anyone who might get it wrong by becoming Rodgers’s next future ex-team.
