Punchline or playoffs, Aaron Rodgers walking fine line with Jets

When the Jets make a mistake with a quarterback, you have to say they don’t mess around. Sometimes you think the last smart decision they made with a quarterback, in terms of results, was Ryan Fitzpatrick, who won them 10 more games than Aaron Rodgers, who still has a terrific chance to be the biggest mistake they’ve ever made with a quarterback

You bet Rodgers is still going to have his chance to turn the Jets back into a playoff team, and maybe even a Super Bowl contender. Or, if he crashes and burns and the Jets crash and burn this season, he will turn them back into as much of a league-wide laughingstock as they’ve ever been. If it does happen that way, this time in Jets history will be remembered as the time they handed the entire franchise to a soon-to-be-41-year-old quarterback who is as likely to be talking about little green men as Gang Green.

Again and again: You knw why they did what they did, in the name of somehow becoming relevant again. The Jets found their way to Rodgers in the same way that the Nets, in their own quest for relevance in a Knicks city, found their way to Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving. And even though the Nets did make that one run, and seemed as if they might be on their way to the Eastern Conference finals and maybe even the NBA Finals, the Kevin/Kyrie thing over there in Brooklyn will always be remembered as an overhyped and overblown failure.

Maybe there’s even symbolism in the fact that Durant had suffered an Achilles injury even before he became a Net. In the end, though, the Nets fell down once Durant was healthy and back to being Durant. They fell down even with Durant and Irving the way the Jets keep falling down with quarterbacks.

If you want to get into the way-back machine, you have to talk about them bringing in Tim Tebow which, in retrospect, wasn’t as much a football call as a desperate cry for help. Then, of course, there is all the recent history, where they took Sam Darnold with the third overall pick in the draft and that turned out to be such a sparkling decision that they bailed out on Darnold three years later and took Zach Wilson with the second overall pick in the draft.

Nobody knew it at the time, or could have known it at the time, but Darnold was the first domino falling as the Jets began to find their way to Rodgers. Wilson was the next domino to fall and before long the Jets, as desperate to finally find a quarterback who could turn them back into a winner, were falling into a trade for Rodgers that they practically had no choice but to make.

Rodgers was 39 at the time of the trade, but the Jets still saw the chance for him to be the most talented quarterback they’d ever had, and that includes Joe Namath. So we absolutely know why the Jets did what they did for a guy who, at this point, has done nothing more for them than fall down when he hasn’t sounded like the guy yelling at you in Central Park about the end being near. Those dominoes started to fall, did they ever, and the Jets were once again exhibiting a flop-sweat desperation to be relevant. And not be a league-wide laughingstock all over again, despite all the skill players they currently have all over the field.

But this is how they have turned into a football team named Rodgers, who keeps making you remember a famous old line from the great Jimmy Breslin when Hugh Carey was governor of New York, when Jimmy referred to Gov. Carey as a dream character in dancing pumps. You better believe that is now Aaron Rodgers, in full. Dancing pumps and darkness retreats and the dumbest and darkest conspiracy theories, and that’s just the short list of weirdness.

This week we got an “unexcused” absence from mini-camp, at least according to his coach, Robert Saleh, that quickly turned into Saleh and his QB1 being on the same, exact unexcused page. How did that happen? That’s not a trick question. It happened because these are the Jets, that’s why.

Now comes this report from Dianna Russini of The Athletic:

“Aaron Rodgers is skipping all of Jets mandatory minicamp this week because he prefers to be somewhere else away from football. That’s his choice.”

Maybe by the time you’re reading this the Jets will not have just reacted to Ms. Russini’s report, they will have wildly overreacted because that’s what they do, it’s practically their default position over there in Florham Park, starting with an owner, Woody Johnson, who constantly makes you recall an old Bill Parcells line about people who don’t know whether a football is blown up or stuffed.

No one is suggesting that Rodgers skipping a mini-camp is the football crime of the century, whatever reasons he might have, whether they’re from the moon or not. Still: the fact of thing with Rodgers’ Jets — and whose are they if they’re not his? Woody’s? Saleh’s? Joe Douglas’s? — is that he does what he wants when he wants the way he says what he wants, with Pat McAfee and fellow conspiracist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Joe Rogan; and about Dr. Anthony Fauci, with whom Rodgers has been shamefully punching above his weight for years.

So the guy who does turn 41 in December, who is coming back from what is a catastrophic sports injury no matter what your age, makes headlines again for something that didn’t happen on a football field, with him doing actual football things. And no one on either our planet or Rodgers’ planet has any idea how much game a guy who was already showing signs of decline in Green Bay is going to have left come September.

What happened this week doesn’t matter if he does show up and show up big in September, if not the player that he was when he was young, he doesn’t look like somebody who looks a lot older than he did the last time we saw him on a football field, when he couldn’t win a home game against the Lions that would have put the Packers in the same place where he’s supposed to put the Jets, which means the postseason.

Rodgers still has a chance to show up as the best quarterback the Jets have ever had, and punch their ticket back to the postseason. Or just be as big a punchline as the Jets have ever had.

THESE  BOMBERS ARE CRUSHING IT, ALCARAZ A MAJOR REASON TO WATCH TENNIS & WEST WAS THE BEST …

Repeat: The Florida Panthers were better than the Rangers, all day long.

Yup, the Bronx Bombers is officially kind of a thing again in baseball.

And it’s worth mentioning, again, that Juan Soto and Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton went into this Yankees-Red Sox weekend at old Fenway with 59 homers among them, and 150-plus RBI.

And two guys — Soto and Judge — who had an OPS of over 1.000.

Just that.

I love the Clay Holmes story and wish I trusted him more than I do.

Wait, Josh Hart and Tyrese Haliburton are still chirping at each other?

Hey, guys.

That dead horse you’re beating?

It really is dead.

If you have never read the Roy Grace novels by the great British writer Peter James, do yourself a favor.

Start anywhere in a long and distinguished series.

And while we’re on the subject of books today:

“Eruption,” by the late Michael Crichton and my writing partner James Patterson is a rip-roaring blast from start to finish.

If you are looking for a reason to still care about men’s tennis, even with the era of Federer-Nadal-Djokovic clearly coming to an end, you have to know that Carlos Alcaraz is that reason.

He is 21 and has already won three of tennis four majors.

Last year he lost the first set of the Wimbledon final against Djokovic, lost it 6-1, and came back to win the match.

Last Sunday in the finals of the French Open, he fell behind Alexander Zverev two sets to one, and had just lost the last five games of the third set, when he turned everything around and won the last two sets 6-1, 6-2.

I’m not saying he’s going to win as many majors as the Three Guys did.

But if Alcaraz is blessed with good health, there’s no telling how many he might win before he’s through.

OK, so now we know that Pinehurst No. 2 can stop Scottie Scheffler the way jail does.

By the way?

You knew it was the U.S. Open this week when you see balls rolling around greens like marbles rolling around a bathtub.

You think 93-year-old Rupert Murdoch ever finds it ironic how obsessed Murdoch media is with Joe Biden’s age?

Probably not.

But then it was Pete Hamill who always said never use irony in an underdeveloped country.

I’m very happy that Danny Hurley elected not to go coach the Lakers, but am now hopeful that Danny will stop talking about not going to coach the Lakers.

It has reached the point where there are enough ex-LeBron coaches to form a conga line.

And if he didn’t get all of them fired, you have to say that he didn’t do a whole lot to keep them on the job.

I was lucky enough to know Jerry West, who passed away this week at the age of 86.

And there wasn’t a single time that I ever spoke to him, across one of an American sports life as remarkable as any our country has ever known, when I didn’t come away from the conversation feeling as if I knew a lot more about basketball than I did before the conversation started.

This is the second Father’s Day of my life when I won’t get to call my Pops.

I sure wish I still could.