It is almost too good to be true that the Giants might be interested in Aaron Rodgers now that Matthew Stafford has shown that he’d prefer to keep playing for a team that actually blocks for him.
Just that Rodgers to the Giants is even a possibility sets up what would be one of the most amazing — and hilarious — stories we have ever had in football in New York, or over in Jersey. Maybe the Giants think that after things went so well with their last reality series, “Hard Knocks,” they now want to produce one of their own with Rodgers, even after seeing what they just saw when Rodgers was working at MetLife Stadium for the Jets.
“The Giants didn’t just see how that all played out,” my buddy Pete the Jets fan, said on Friday. “They had a front row seat.”
But then Pete said that even if this doesn’t happen for the Giants, just the fact that they’re considering it makes him feel better about pretty much everything.
“This sounds crazy,” he said, “but they actually might be a bigger mess than we are.”
So the team that let Saquon Barkley not just leave the building, but head on down to Philadelphia and break rushing records and, oh by the way, win the Super Bowl might be considering a way to keep Aaron Rodgers IN the building. How great is that?
And why are they considering this, if you can believe all the various reports on this subject? It’s because this is exactly how desperate the Giants are, especially if they don’t believe that Deion’s kid, Shedeur Sanders, is still going to be on the board when they’re on the clock with the third pick in the upcoming NFL draft. Or perhaps, and maybe even more likely, they don’t believe that he ought to be the third pick in the draft.
We all know what we saw with Rodgers this past season. We saw the plays he didn’t make and the throws he couldn’t complete when the Jets still had a season, starting with the short-arm throw that could have beaten the Vikings in London and sure did not. We also know that the coaching situation for the Jets was as bad as there has ever been in the history of the franchise, all the way back to the AFL, and Jets fans know that is saying a mouthful.
We know about the training camp days he missed and the distraction he was every single Tuesday when he appeared on Pat McAfee’s ESPN show, sometimes making you think the only way to shut him up was to send him to the blue tent. We know that the Jets made him the single most powerful player they’ve ever had, before and after his Achilles injury, and then we all watched the Jets win fewer games than they had the season before with Zach Wilson and friends, bless their hearts. It all worked out so well that one of the very first orders of business for new head coach Aaron Glenn and new general manager Darren Mougey was to tell Rodgers to put Florham Park in his rearview mirror, so they could put him in theirs.
But as badly as it all played out last season for the Jets after they did get to 2-1 — and even though Rodgers trying to move around in the pocket occasionally made him look like one of the dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History — he still managed to throw 28 touchdown passes in the season during which he turned 41, against 11 interceptions, and have nearly 4,000 passing yards. In comparison, and with a vastly better team around him, Stafford threw 20 TD passes for the Rams against eight picks and just over 3,700 passing yards.
Can Rodgers sling it the way Stafford still can? He can’t. But in fairness to him, and even though he makes it real hard to do that sometimes, all those passes he did complete last season didn’t complete themselves. And in a world where the Giants Sundays and Mondays featured the outgoing Daniel Jones and Drew Lock and the cutlets guy, you can certainly see why they might very well be kicking the tires on Rodgers. Even the tire he blew out four plays into his first Jets season.
Do the Giants see Shedeur — or Cam Ward for that matter — as a potential franchise quarterback? There is no way of knowing that, because maybe even they don’t know it at this point. There is no way of knowing whether they think Sam Darnold, the ex-Jet — just the story of New York quarterbacks over the past several years is a reality series, when you really think about it — is worth a big contract. Or if they think another gramps, Kirk Cousins, is a viable stop-gap option for them, certainly not after what the Falcons saw from Cousins last season before they gave up on him.
But this is how we arrive at this juncture in New York football where what the Jets finally saw as a worst-case scenario for them — another year of “The Aaron Rodgers Show” — might be the best-case scenario for the Giants. You really can’t make it up.
No one really knows what the Giants are thinking. And no one seems to know what Rodgers is thinking, even though we know what a deep thinker he is, just ask him. I texted an NFL guy I very must trust on Friday afternoon and joked that I would pay him if the possibility of Rodgers becoming a Giant was real.
Here was his response:
“Real.”
Only at this point in Giants history, after they let Saquon walk after talking it to death on “Hard Knocks,” and not so terribly long after they extended a quarterback, Jones, that they knew would never be what they were so desperate for him to be, could they actually see Rodgers, who will turn 42 in December, as their best option to be relevant again, and less of a joke than they’ve become.
Of course that is why the Jets traded for Rodgers in the first place. So the Giants, if they are considering this, will have circled all the way back there. And what could possibly go wrong?
Rodgers, by all accounts, wanted to return to the Jets, and was told no, something stars like him treat like part of some foreign language. Could the Giants, despite what they looked like last season — and what they looked like for most of the season was the worst NFL team in all the land — be Rodgers’ best option at this point the way he might be theirs? That remains to be seen.
But there is no reason at the present time to want to watch the Giants next season. Rodgers, despite everything, would give people a reason to watch. Whether it turns into train wreck TV or not.
A TRIBUTE TO TRAUTWIG, KNICKS NEED TO BEAT CELTICS IN STANDINGS & READY TO WATCH SOTO HIT …
There was no sport Al Trautwig, who passed away this week, couldn’t cover.
No question he was afraid to ask.
No broadcast he didn’t enhance, and no game he made bigger than it was.
You know what the NBA needs more than anything?
It needs for both LeBron and Steph to make runs in the playoffs.
If the Yankees do make a play for Nolan Arenado, and put him across the diamond from Paul Goldschmidt, what does that say about all these great Yankee kids we keep hearing about?
You know who the last great Yankee kid was?
Aaron Judge.
Judge posed a pretty great question, by the way, after the Yankees finally lifted their rule about facial hair:
If not having a beard is a deal-breaker, was that somebody you really wanted on your team in the first place?
The Knicks, clearly, haven’t been able to beat the Celtics in the regular season.
But what they can still do is beat them out for second place in the East.
Which could mean a lot in the postseason.
And maybe keep them away from a dangerous young Pistons team in the first round.
Maybe the most amazing thing about the current mayor of New York, Mr. Adams, is that he still carries himself like he’s going good.
No worries, if some of the mock drafts are correct, we still might get Deion’s kid with the Jets.
Which, you have to admit, would be kind of a dream.
I love the idea that the PGA Tour somehow merging with a bust-out operation like LIV is going to save professional golf.
I constantly hear that we don’t give enough love to how the current NBA is more talented, across the board, than it has ever been.
It is, in so many ways, a completely false narrative.
Nobody is disputing how much talent is on display in the league, and on a nightly basis.
That’s not the problem.
The overriding problem is that the product isn’t as good as everybody associated with the league continues to think it is.
Despite so many of the league’s stars acting as if that’s somehow somebody else’s fault.
Every couple of weeks, Mikal Bridges looks like the player the Knicks thought they were getting.
Golf is always a lot more interesting when Jordan Spieth is somewhere near the top of the leaderboard.
But that can only happen if he doesn’t keep hitting drives in the general direction of Topeka every time he gets back up there.
You know what was big fun last year in Baseball New York?
Watching Juan Soto hit.
You know what might be even bigger fun this year?
Watching Juan Soto hit.
Joe Schoen says he won’t simply make a decision to save his job.
Good one, no kidding.
The less defense the Knicks play, the more you get the idea that they’re getting Bill Russell back as Mitchell Robinson is finally back on the court.