Aaron Rodgers insists he'll hold Jets to a certain standard
Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers speaks to the media during training camp at the Atlantic Health Jets Training Center in Florham Park, N.J., on Wednesday. Credit: Ed Murray
Long before he was the self-appointed Sherriff of the Standard at Jets training camp practices in Florham Park, the one who makes sure no error is tolerated and each misstep is met with a menacing snarl, glare, or huff of obvious disapproval, Aaron Rodgers had to learn exactly what it takes to be successful as a football player and football team. He watched… and certainly took his share of those gestures.
“I mean, I got to play behind Brett (Favre) and he's a first-ballot Hall of Famer,” Rodgers said on Wednesday of the earliest years of his career with the Packers. “I got to see what the standard of excellence looks like every single day. There was never a drop off in his energy, his enthusiasm, the way he practiced, the way he came in. And even on days where — now I know what he probably felt like at times where you're in the third day in a row of pads and you're a little bit tired and body’s aching and you had some squats the day before and you're trying to get the body moving and going — you’ve still got to bring it.”
There were others who impressed those ideals upon him as well.
“I had some great coaches along the way too, starting in high school and junior college and at Cal with Coach (Jeff) Tedford and as a young player with Tom Clements and Mike McCarthy and Joe Philbin,” he said. “You know, those guys always kind of held me to a standard even when I was the scout team guy. They would pull me aside, have conversations with me about the future and about leadership and about body language and a lot of different things that helped me along the way.”
Before all those people passed the supposed secret sauce along to Rodgers they received it from their own mentors and tutors and prodders and pouters.
It's why every bark, eyeroll and headshake that Rodgers delivered in response to the many glitches that have popped up throughout this first week of on-field action this summer, from wayward snaps to misread routes, hasn’t necessarily come from him, but from a long tradition of displeasure and intolerance for sloppiness trickling down through the sport’s generations.
And now it is being passed forward to the next one.
Soon, in the next few years since football moves very fast, Garrett Wilson and Breece Hall — and maybe even Joe Tippmann — will be the veteran offensive leaders of their teams. It could be Jets teams, or perhaps others. But they will be the ones who are charged with spotting and rooting out subpar performances by fellow players. And when they do they’ll undoubtedly be thinking back to this time when they were the targets of Rodgers’ more-than-occasional rants and raves.
Wilson, who was caught on video in what looked like a two-way heated discussion with Rodgers following some sort of miscommunication in a recent practice, far from backing down from the four-time MVP and 20-year veteran, already appears up to that role.
This isn’t the only lineage of such matters.
“I mean, I've heard stories of Peyton Manning and Tom Brady, not to compare them, but it's the same thing, the expectation and the standard is high,” Jets coach Robert Saleh said. “As a quarterback, he's trying to operate at a certain level of efficiency, which means people around him need to be efficient at the same level. When he's not feeling that as a group's leader and voice, he voices his opinion.”
Although Rodgers’ dissatisfied demonstrations have yielded results — after two subpar days of practice without a touchdown throw the first-team offense was nearly perfect on Wednesday as Rodgers threw six scoring passes — they have also raised some unwanted outside attention. Having players, no matter how accomplished, scolding other players is a rough look. Rodgers, though, insists that he’s actually a lot less intense and demanding than he used to be.
“I think I'm a little more tempered than I was as a younger player,” he said Wednesday. “Fuse is a little bit longer.”
But there is one thing that hasn’t changed about Rodgers, or football, over the years.
“The standard has always been the standard,” he said.
And as long as he is here with the Jets he’s going to enforce it.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.