It looks like Sean Payton got the last laugh.
More than a year after Payton criticized the hype surrounding the Jets and body-slammed offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett in comments to Jarrett Bell of USA Today, a loss by the Jets to Payton’s Broncos sparked a report, emerging on the same day G.M. Joe Douglas was fired, that Johnson was ready to pull the plug on the Aaron Rodgers experiment.
As first reported by TheAthletic.com and confirmed by PFT, Johnson suggested benching Rodgers after the Week 4 loss to Denver.
Although Johnson was talked out of it, the disclosure becomes the first shot in the previously cold war regarding Rodgers’s future with the team. Recently, we’ve surmised that, even though Rodgers has said he wants to play next year, there’s no guarantee the Jets will want him back. It seemed that, even before this development, they wouldn’t.
It’s now fair to ask, based on how he responds to the leak regarding Johnson’s idea to bench him, whether Rodgers will want to keep playing for the team at all in 2024.
Last year, Rodgers railed about the leaks in the Jets organization, after reports emerged that quarterback Zach Wilson was reluctant to play after he’d been benched and the team wanted to un-bench him.
“I think it’s chickenshit at its core, and I think it has no place in a winning organization,” Rodgers said of the leaks.
That’s what he said about a leak that wasn’t about him. What will he say about a leak that puts Rodgers in the crosshairs?
He won’t have a press conference this week, because the Jets are on a bye. He has an instantly-available platform with Pat McAfee, and the next question becomes whether Rodgers will dial in tomorrow and address both the firing of Douglas and the news that Johnson wanted to bench him.
Even though Rodgers has struggled, it’s a silly idea. In a Week 3 win over the Jets, Rodgers was starting to look like his old self, after many months of barely playing. To think Johnson was ready to make such a stunning move after the very next game highlights how impulsive and short-sighted he can be.
This time, Johnson messed with the wrong Marine. Rodgers won’t take it. What will Johnson do when Rodgers fires back? Demand that he return the jar of honey from the queen’s garden? Cut him?
Rodgers would surely welcome that, now that he knows the boss wanted to put his butt on the bench.
So, basically, get your popcorn ready. For as bad as the Jets’ season has been, things could soon be getting good.
That said, don’t be surprised if the Jets try to muster a cleanup on aisle 8 by suggesting that Johnson was joking. And, like the supposed joke Dolphins owner Stephen Ross once told coach Brian Flores about paying him $100,000 for each game he lost, we’ll have a very hard time finding the punchline.