Aaron Rodgers turns in a vintage performance for Jets, but he's not celebrating just yet
Aaron Rodgers of the Jets looks for a receiver during the first quarter against the New England Patriots at MetLife Stadium on Thursday. Credit: Jim McIsaac
On a Thursday night when just about everyone at MetLife Stadium felt like celebrating, the guy who was the reason they all were able to seemed to want nothing to do with the festivities.
Aaron Rodgers gladly led the Jets to a 24-3 victory over the Patriots, mincing up the New England secondary with a precision-passing demonstration the likes of which few have ever provided in a green uniform. It gave the franchise a rare laugher over a rival that has tormented it for most of this century and capped the quarterback’s true home opener that came a little over a year after his aborted attempt at it.
And yes, the fans serenaded him at several points in the second half with chants of “Aa-Ron Rod-gers! Aa-Ron Rod-gers!” After months of calling his new office JetLife Stadium, Rodgers finally made it feel like his home. This was what the Jets and their fans thought they were getting when they traded for him, and Rodgers lived up to all of it.
For him, though, this was just a win. It felt like a lot more than that for the Jets because, frankly, there haven’t been a whole lot of them in recent years. But for Rodgers it was just a Week 3 game with a steady result. He completed 27 of 35 for 281 yards, two touchdowns and a 118.9 passer rating.
Ho-hum.
So there were no wild gestures from him. No excessive high-fives or curtain calls. Certainly no hugs with the head coach after first-half touchdowns. Rodgers appeared to stiff-arm Robert Saleh when he came in for an embrace after Breece Hall’s 1-yard touchdown run in the second quarter (the two later played it off as their way of celebrating the offense providing a rare two-score lead for the defense). It’s way too early for any of that. The Jets may not know it. For them this is all new. But Rodgers does.
This was special, of course, not because Rodgers walked onto the field here for the first time, but because he walked off it. But even after Allen Lazard caught Rodgers’ first home touchdown pass as a Jet and ran the ball over to hand it to the quarterback as a souvenir, Rodgers looked puzzled.
“I don’t remember saying that,” Rodgers said of that football having some special meaning to him. “But I’ll take it. Thanks, Allen.”
The key now is to normalize the sensational.
“We should celebrate it but we should expect to win,” Rodgers said. “The next step is expecting to dominate.”
So his message after this second straight victory, this resounding win over a bitter foe, this Sistine Chapel ceiling of a masterpiece compared to the fingerpaintings the immediate predecessors at his position created, appeared to be a paraphrase of what he once famously told those who were freaking out over early season losses at his old place of business.
R-E-L-A-X. It’s only one game.
That may be Rodgers’ biggest challenge this season, changing the attitude and mentality of an organization that is so unused to success it has to be taught how to handle it. Then again, who can blame the coaches, players and fans for wanting to revel in positivity when they’ve been beaten down so thoroughly, so often, for so long.
Asked about posting “only” 24 points on a night when the offense seemed to leave plenty of other opportunities and he himself said he felt like they could score 100, Lazard said: “Shoot, beggars can’t be choosers. We have to realize we came a long way from last year and even from Week 1.”
And Garret Wilson couldn’t help but let out a laugh when he was asked if he reflects on what things used to be like for the offense. “Yeah,” he said, “I ain’t gonna fake it.”
Heck, even Rodgers’ Achilles injury that he suffered the last time he played on this turf at MetLi — beg your pardon, JetLife Stadium — was part of the lore of losing in these parts. From the vantage point of Thursday night’s glee, the shock and disappointment of that injury seemed as far back in the past as any of the well-documented Jets blunders that have plagued this team since Super Bowl III.
Rodgers’ urgency to whip these Jets into shape began to flash earlier this week, even after the win in Nashville on Sunday. He was pleased with the victory but unhappy with the way the offense was performing.
“It doesn’t really matter how close we are,” he said of the insistences of some on the team that the Jets were just a smidgen out of sync and that was somehow a good thing. “What matters is what we did on the field, you know? How close we are is great for coaches because they can coach it up, the whole thing, but it’d be a boondoggle to keep doing the same thing over and over and expect different results. We’ve got to change a couple things, we’ve got to be a little sharper, we’ve got to start faster.”
Rodgers certainly did that.
Despite a fruitless opening drive, Rodgers completed 12 of his first 13 passes and led two first-half touchdown drives that included a 10-yard scoring pass to Allen Lazard and that 1-yard run by Hall. In the second half he scrambled for 11 yards and went 6-for-6 on a 66-yard drive that he capped with a 2-yard TD pass to Garrett Wilson to make it 21-3.
Rodgers was asked earlier in the week about running out onto the field and the de ja vu he might feel from last year’s triumphant trot that was sabotaged shortly thereafter by the Achilles injury. “I’m sure there will be some stuff,” he said, “but whatever happens, happens.”
The Jets had a lot of the same theatrical introductions on Thursday as they did for the 2023 opener, everything from pyrotechnics to lasers. Rodgers said he was glad no one tried to hand him an American flag for his big entrance, as happened last year for an iconic photograph that became outdated about a half hour later. He said he is just superstitious enough that he probably wouldn’t have accepted it this time. Rodgers gamely came through the tunnel into the middle of all of the hoopla, but that’s where his participation in the show ended.
After that he was the show. No lasers required.
And that’s the biggest difference for the Jets.
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.