Aaron Rodgers cools his jets as he takes over the Jets to start training camp
New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers at training camp in Florham Park, N.J. on Thursday. Credit: AP/Seth Wenig
FLORHAM PARK, N.J. — As the Jets plodded through a rather sloppy first practice of training camp on Thursday with the offense looking more like a garage band than the well-tuned symphony Aaron Rodgers was brought here to conduct, Allen Lazard was waiting for the explosion.
He, more than anyone else on the field, knows the quarterback. They played together at an extremely high level for five seasons in Green Bay and he understands the attention to detail and the unwavering desire to reach precision that drove Rodgers to four MVP awards, a Hall of Fame career and a Super Bowl title he had with the Packers. Rodgers’ tolerance for slapdash football is as minimal as it is maniacal.
It was, he figured, just a matter of time before Mount Rodgers erupted.
But that moment never came.
Instead, Rodgers calmly discussed some routes and concepts with receivers after they were run incorrectly, including a brief but meaningful chat with Garrett Wilson after the second-year receiver admitted he had “busted a play” in red-zone reps.
“He was saying, ‘Get it right,' ” Wilson said. “That’s all. ‘Get it right.’ ”
It isn’t just the uniform that has changed for Rodgers. His disposition and awareness have, too. He seems to have taken his own well-cited advice from several years ago. He has R-E-L-A-X-ed.
“Today,” Rodgers said, “we had quite a few little issues.”
Rodgers’ temper wasn’t one of them.
Instead of (often angrily) urging everyone to try to keep up with him, as he often did in Green Bay, with the Jets he is slowing himself down so everyone else can catch up.
“I’m seeing it even more so with the fact of how much he is opening his arms, putting his hand out, trying to help guys, teach,” Lazard said on Thursday. “Not to say that he was hard to play with at first in Green Bay. He was a little bit more, ‘You guys gotta pick it up.’ But he’s a little bit slower here. There are a lot of new players . . . He’s taking his time.”
Rodgers admitted to letting things slide that he once would have scowled at.
“I feel like I’ve grown a lot over the years,” he said. “Some of that is the well-documented planned medicine journeys I have talked about, but the other is perspective. As you get older you see things a little bit clearer, I think. Hindsight is 20-20 and you try to rectify some of the things you did a certain way that you feel like you could have done better.”
At this stage of his career — and at this stage of his first season with the Jets — that means pacing himself.
“I think it’s always important to have patience in shorts and helmets the first few days of camp,” Rodgers said. “Sometimes the patience can wear thin when it’s repeat mistakes, but we’re just building this thing right now and we want to build it the right way. Maybe earlier in my career I was a little more easily angered. I feel like I am a little less triggered as I have gotten older.”
He’s no longer an unapproachable, intimidating grump. He’s become more of an affable professor.
How that affects the football in September and beyond remains to be seen. For now, the Jets are thrilled to have Rodgers teaching them the offense that he mastered over several years in Green Bay, even if he bristled at the idea of being a “player-coach” as Robert Saleh suggested, harkening back to his childhood and remembering Tree Rollins holding that title for the Magic in the NBA at the end of his career.
“I do know that being an older player on the team, that’s part of the responsibility, to teach a little bit more,” he said. “There is a lot of teaching for sure.”
He does have some help in that regard. There are the actual coaches, including offensive coordinator Nathanial Hackett who designed the system in Green Bay. And Lazard, who calls what the Jets are installing “the Aaron Rodgers Offense,” is as fluent in it as Rodgers is and said he often takes on the role of “teacher assistant.”
“Sometimes I have to dumb myself down a little bit to make it more receivable for other guys because I’ve been doing it for so long it’s just second nature at this point,” Lazard said.
Others are just starting to get a feel for the schemes.
“It’s a process,” Wilson said. “You have to start somewhere and the next day you want to be a step ahead of that. That’s the way we’ve been looking at it and the way we go about it. I have to realize there are 10 or 12 of us who are all trying to get on the same page as him, so that’s how you have to go about it. When we get our reps, they have to be the most important reps.”
None of this is to say Rodgers won’t become more surly toward baggy routes, limp cuts and indecisive reads as the season progresses. For now, though, none of them appeared to rankle Rodgers the way they might have in the past.
“Get it right,” he calmly told Wilson.
That’s been his message — and his tone — to everyone.
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.
