Aaron Rodgers isn't the first QB to call audible late in their career; Joe Namath knows all about it

Joe Namath considers himself a diehard Jets fan, so it’s no wonder he had the same reaction as millions of other loyal supporters when word came down that Aaron Rodgers would be traded from the Packers. 

“Like every Jets fan, I was thrilled to see that he was even considering coming to the team,” Namath told Newsday. “Then to see that they got the deal done? Wow. We know we have a shot. We’ve got a legitimate guy.” 

But Namath relates to the Rodgers acquisition more personally than most, and not just because he is the only quarterback to author a Super Bowl victory for the Jets. Namath knows just how challenging it can be for Rodgers because Broadway Joe experienced what it was like to leave the team where he created unforgettable memories and play somewhere else late in his career. 

Namath’s time with the Jets had come to an end after the 1976 season,  just as the team was ready to turn the page with another Alabama first-round quarterback in Richard Todd. Not content to finish his career at age 34, yet not wanting to stand in the way of Todd, whom he had befriended when the two worked out in the offseason at Alabama when Todd played for the Crimson Tide, Namath got one more shot. 

Fate would not be kind, however, as Namath lasted just four games with the Los Angeles Rams before taking a vicious hit to the sternum in a Week 4 game against the Bears. It would be the final game for the future Hall of Famer. 

But it would also signal an eventual trend for older quarterbacks to play elsewhere late in their careers, with Rodgers being the latest to switch teams after a long run with his original club. The trend has even accelerated in recent years, and with great success. Consider: In 2020, Tom Brady left the Patriots after 20 seasons and won a Super Bowl with the Buccaneers. The next year, Matthew Stafford was traded from the Lions to the Rams, and he, too, won a Super Bowl in his first year in Los Angeles. 

Now it’s the Jets’ turn to see if they can enjoy a similar renaissance with Rodgers, who was dealt by the Packers after they decided to move forward with former first-round pick Jordan Love. It was a remarkably similar scenario to the Jets’ trade for Brett Favre in 2008, with Rodgers being the young quarterback to nudge the team into parting ways with Favre. 

The Jets hope it will be a far better experience than the one Namath endured in his short-lived time with the Rams. 

Just seeing Namath in a Rams uniform never felt quite right, and Namath himself admitted it was a “clumsy” and uncomfortable experience. Even if it started with plenty of enthusiasm and optimism on his part, despite suffering from chronic knee problems he’d dealt with in New York. 

“[Rams coach] Chuck Knox talked with me and got me to come out there, and I was thrilled,” Namath said. “The main thing to me was [the Jets] had a rookie quarterback who needed to play, and that was Richard Todd. It’s not the same as Aaron — he knows he can still play — but the love up there with Green Bay was similar to what we had with the Jets. Of course, Aaron had some disagreements with the Packers before he left, but the transition to Los Angeles for me was clumsy. It was all on me. I’m the one that didn’t adjust well.”

Things started out well enough on the field, as Namath won two of his first three starts and had three touchdown passes and an interception. But he took a beating against the Bears, and after throwing four interceptions, he was replaced by Pat Haden. 

That was the tipping point for Knox, who stuck with Haden, but even before the injury, things weren’t quite what Namath had imagined. Especially the part about being told by his coaches to stop patting the ball just before he released his passes — a trademark of Namath’s throughout his entire football career. 

“I tried too hard to do what they wanted,” Namath said, confiding publicly for the first time about the issue of not patting the ball. “I didn’t want to be like a big shot and doing it my way, but one of the things, it was a technical thing. They didn’t like me tapping the ball before I threw it, thought it was a waste of time. So I tried to learn to throw in my 14th year of professional football with a different style.”

But there was an unintended consequence to the change, as Namath soon discovered. 

“I didn’t coil my left shoulder as much,” he said. “I stressed so much not touching that ball once I got it up there by my ear that I wasn’t coiling my body to give me the strength and velocity on the ball. That’s one of the things that caused me not to play well. It was stupid, but I was trying to do it the way it was coached. I didn’t want to be like, ‘You can’t change me.’ But if you watch a lot of quarterbacks, you’ll see that he taps the ball before he throws. It gets your upper body coiled, because you’re throwing with your legs, your hips and your upper body.”

Asked why he had never mentioned this before, Namath simply said, “It sounds like an excuse, and I don’t make excuses.”

Looking back, though, he knew it was an ill-conceived idea to adjust his throwing motion. 

“Who am I to change a style that’s worked since junior high?” he said with sarcasm. “But it was how much I was putting on my brain. I didn’t want to ruffle feathers.”

Haden led the Rams to a 10-4 record and a playoff berth, but they were eliminated by the Vikings at home, 14-7, in the divisional round. Near the end of the game, with the Rams’ offense floundering and Haden throwing three interceptions, Knox looked at Namath.

“So we’re standing on the sidelines in the fourth quarter," Namath said, "and Chuck looks at me, and I didn’t give him back a look of enthusiasm. He was looking to put me in, and if I’d have given him the right look, he might have put me in the game.” 

Namath wanted no part of it, not after sitting on the bench since early in the season. 

“It still impacts me,” Namath said. “I felt awful. I knew I couldn’t play. I felt like I let Chuck Knox down.”

ARCHIE AND PEYTON 

Archie Manning has seen the good and the bad of quarterbacks adjusting to new locales late in their careers. He experienced the bad himself. He experienced the good as the father of former Colts and Broncos great Peyton Manning. 

The longtime Saints quarterback, whose individual brilliance couldn’t overcome chronic deficiencies elsewhere on the New Orleans roster, was forced to adjust to new circumstances after 11 seasons. Drafted second overall in 1971, Manning was traded to the Houston Oilers in the strike-shortened 1982 season. 

“You lose a little of your comfort zone,” Manning said. “It wasn’t easy for me. I was at a point where I had kids, but I didn’t take my family and I was living in an apartment, and that was different. It really made me stay at the facility more. I had nothing to go home to.” 

The Oilers wanted Manning to start right away. He was astonished. 

“I get traded on a Friday afternoon, and (offensive coordinator] Jim Shofner says he’ll meet me at the Marriott for breakfast,” Manning said. “He said, ‘Archie, I’m in the twilight of a pretty mediocre coaching career, but [head coach] Eddie Biles wants you to start tomorrow.”

“He wants to start ME?” Manning said. “I don’t know one single play.”

Manning made his first start for the Oilers two months later, in the second game back from the strike. 

“We practiced on a Thursday, and I started in New England on a Sunday,” Manning said. “I remember telling [tight end] Dave Casper, I said, ‘Ghost [Casper’s nickname], there’s no way with two days of practice I can comprehend and do what I need to do, but if you’re open in the middle of the field, I’ll find you. It was truly sandlot football. And it worked. I threw him a jump pass in that game. That was crazy for me.”

The Oilers lost the game, 29-21, and Manning, who had Earl Campbell in his backfield, wound up losing all five of his starts. 

“They were killing Earl on first and second down, and they were killing me on third down,” Manning said. 

As challenging as it was for Archie as a player, it was much more satisfying as a parent to watch Peyton navigate the experience of playing for a new team late in his career. After a neck injury led to the Colts parting ways with Manning in 2011, he settled on the Broncos after an exhaustive deliberation in free agency. Having a former quarterback like John Elway running the Broncos’ football operation was a deciding factor. 

“They listened to Peyton,” Archie said. “They let him have a voice. The main thing he would tell you is that he had some damn good people to throw to.”

Peyton Manning wound up winning a second Super Bowl in the 2015 season, a remarkable finishing touch to a Hall of Fame career. 

“[The Broncos] were the only team that really just understood what I was going through emotionally, physically, and a lot of that was Elway,” Manning said in a 2021 interview. ‘They were the only team that said, ‘Hey, Peyton, give us your Indianapolis playbook and we will form this hybrid offense with the plays we like in Denver that will help you at this point in your career.’ Not every team did that.” 

BRADY THE BUC

It was a similarly comfortable fit for Brady when he went to the Buccaneers. Coach Bruce Arians knew enough not to mess with Brady’s head by demanding he run a different system than the one he thrived in with the Patriots. Bringing in All-Pro tight end Rob Gronkowski was the kind of move that lent itself to Brady’s success. That’s a similar dynamic the Jets are now using with Rodgers after acquiring former Packers receivers Alan Lazard and Randall Cobb, as well as former Vikings running back Dalvin Cook. 

“There were a lot of things that were really intriguing to me about the [Buccaneers] organization, the players, the coaches and the willingness of everyone to try to accomplish what the goal of playing football is, which is to win," Brady said in an interview shortly after signing with Tampa Bay in 2020. 

Brady enjoyed one of his best seasons in leading the Bucs to a Super Bowl that year, and while he didn’t get back to the big game over his final two seasons, it was nevertheless a remarkable late-career transition that allowed him to go out on his own terms. 

But teams that do invest in an older quarterback need to make a calculated decision about how it will pan out. And there is sometimes no easy answer. 

“To me, that’s a very interesting aspect of the game,” Packers Hall of Fame general manager Ron Wolf told Newsday. “At what point is it over? You can’t be emotional here. It didn’t work out for Joe Namath when he went to the Rams. Look at John Unitas. That didn’t work out too well after he left Baltimore for San Diego.”

'UNITAS WE STAND'

Unitas is perhaps the ultimate example of a player who played longer than he should have. After a Hall of Fame career with the Colts, he played just four games with the Chargers at age 40. 

“To see John get benched in Baltimore was heartbreaking,” former Colts, Browns and Giants GM Ernie Accorsi told Newsday. 

A clearly fading Unitas was benched early in the 1972 season in favor of Marty Domres, and in the team’s final game at Memorial Stadium that year, with fans clamoring for Unitas to play one more time, Domres went out with an injury late in the game. Unitas threw only one pass, but it went for a touchdown. The crowd went crazy. 

“They had a plane fly over the stadium carrying a banner that said, ‘Unitas We Stand,’ ” Accorsi recalled.  "John comes in, throws a floater to Eddie Hinton, who grabs it and goes for a long touchdown.”

Accorsi said Unitas specifically told Domres not to fake an injury so he could go into the game, and Domres insisted he was truly hurt. Accorsi eventually found out otherwise. 

“Would you tell me before one of us dies?” Accorsi told Domres. “He admitted it to me 25 years later he wasn’t hurt.” 

The next year in San Diego, Unitas was a shell of his former self. 

REGRET FOR MONTANA

Joe Montana had a solid run as Kansas City’s quarterback after being traded by the 49ers in 1993, once the team decided on Steve Young as its full-time starter. He went 17-8 over two years, getting Kansas City to the AFC Championship Game his first season. But injuries prompted him to retire with one year left on his contract, something Montana regretted. 

“I quit because of the injuries, and I wanted to be able to play with my kids,” he said during an ESPN interview in 2021. “Still, the first two, three years, I didn’t want to watch [games]. I was still mad I retired. I still could have kept playing. I made that decision, and I regretted it.” 

NAMATH: RODGERS NO. 1

Now it is Rodgers’ turn to see if he can squeeze more elite play out of his career and help resurrect the Jets’ fortunes in the process. And one man who believes that’s exactly what will happen is the only man to have won a Super Bowl for the Jets. 

On Jan. 12, 1969, after guaranteeing a win during the week before Super Bowl III against the Colts, Namath ran off the Orange Bowl field wagging his index finger skyward after a monumental 16-7 upset victory. Namath now desperately hopes Rodgers can lead the Jets to their next championship. 

In fact, he believes the Jets have the most talented quarterback who has ever played the game. 

“I have never seen anyone play better than him,” Namath said. “We had Peyton Manning, who was great, and Unitas, of course. And Tom Brady with those seven championships, he’s at the top of everything. He answered the challenge every time. But I’m talking about the way [Rodgers] moves, his agility, his throwing, the brains.”

Namath is as hopeful as he’s ever been since winning it all so long ago.

“Honest to God, I wish we’d already won another championship, or even several,” Namath said. “There is some serious enthusiasm, and it’s going to be so much fun watching. I can’t wait to see what happens.”

By Bob Glauber

Special to NewsdayBobGlauber

Bob Glauber retired in 2022 after covering the NFL for nearly 40 years. He was selected in 2021 for the Bill Nunn Career Achievement Award by the Pro Football Writers of America, and is a three-time winner of the New York State Sportswriter of the Year by the National Sports Media Association. President of the PFWA for the 2018-20 seasons, he is the author of “The Forgotten First” and “Guts and Genius.”