The New York Jets stunk up Levi’s Stadium in most facets on Monday night. However, they did show a few positive flashes throughout the game. We saw bits and pieces of the championship-caliber potential this team believes it has.
Among those, none was more important than the performance of their starting quarterback, Aaron Rodgers.
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How Rodgers would look coming off an Achilles injury was the Jets’ single biggest question going into the 2024 season. And on Monday night, they got some extremely encouraging answers, even if they were buried underneath an otherwise grotesque team-wide display.
Aaron Rodgers played well in San Francisco
The Jets’ starting quarterback was their best player on Monday night.
Rodgers did not light up the box score, going 13-of-21 for 167 yards, 1 touchdown, and 1 interception with 1 sack for -5 yards. However, he passed the eye test with flying colors. His raw stats belie how good he actually looked.
Quick, confident, decisive
In his first full football game in 610 days, Rodgers looked comfortable and decisive. He got the ball out very quickly; Rodgers averaged 2.33 seconds from snap to throw, the fastest mark among quarterbacks in Week 1.
There were no signs of hesitancy or a lack of confidence in his body. He identified his matchups pre-snap, hit the depth of his drop, and slung the rock with his signature gusto. His quick-passing approach helped him keep the 49ers pass rush at bay (1 sack, 4 QB hits).
Some people might scoff at Rodgers’ lightning-quick release time, claiming it shows that he is immobile and cannot buy time anymore. Those people don’t understand how the NFL works in 2024.
This is a quick-passing league. Teams are getting the ball out faster and shorter every year, with the goals of protecting their quarterback, generating easy completions, and giving their weapons chances to make plays. You want to protect Rodgers? You want Garrett Wilson and Breece Hall to eat? Then Rodgers must get the ball out quickly and decisively, and he did that very well on Monday.
Rodgers’ 2.33 time-to-throw on Monday was identical to Tua Tagovailoa’s league-low mark in the 2023 season. Tagovailoa led the NFL in passing yards and helped Miami finish second in points per game.
In 2021, when Tom Brady led the NFL with a career-high 5,316 passing yards at 44 years old, his time-to-throw was… 2.33 seconds.
Rodgers cannot evade rushers, scramble, or throw on the run as well as he used to. However, as Brady proved during his Buccaneers days, those deficiencies do not prevent a quarterback from having the chance to be a great passer. In the NFL of the 2020s, you can shred defenses from the pocket using brainpower and accuracy.
If Rodgers continues to get the ball out fast, he can have a highly successful 2024 season as a passer (even if Tagovailoa and Brady’s numbers are a bit ambitious). A fast release time will keep Rodgers safe, help the Jets’ offense stay on-schedule with high-percentage passes, and give the team’s best playmakers ample opportunities to gain yards after the catch.
Command at the line of scrimmage
Rodgers was active in getting to the line of scrimmage, often hurrying the Jets to the line so he had time to read the defense and make adjustments. This is a trait the Jets have not enjoyed at the quarterback position in a long time. It will help them overcome the deficiencies of offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett, counter in-game adjustments made by the opposing defense, and ensure the Jets’ best players will get the football when they have favorable matchups.
Rodgers also pulled off one of his classic tricks: drawing the defense offsides and launching a long bomb for a touchdown.
These are traits that nobody should have expected to disappear with age. Nonetheless, it was promising to see them in action for the first time. New York has a coach on the field at all times, and it will work wonders in a modern NFL where defenses are more complex than ever.
Accuracy and arm talent
When throwing the football, Rodgers’ arm looked like it still had plenty of juice.
Rodgers displayed good velocity and accuracy on most of his throws. While his 61.9% completion rate doesn’t jump off the page, two of Rodgers’ passes were wide-open drops, and Garrett Wilson failed to get his second foot in bounds on another well-thrown pass. There was also a miscommunication with Wilson that resulted in Rodgers essentially throwing the ball away. If you adjusted for those four plays, Rodgers’ completion rate would jump to 80% (16-of-20).
Aaron Rodgers can still sling it#Jets pic.twitter.com/wmE2YPyHHI
— Michael Nania (@Michael_Nania) September 10, 2024
Advanced production
Despite his mediocre fantasy football numbers, a few metrics matched the film to show how well Rodgers actually played.
Pro Football Focus scored Rodgers with an 86.2 overall grade, which ranked fifth-best among quarterbacks in Week 1. While I’m not sure I would rank Rodgers that high (he’s above Baker Mayfield, for instance), it is still a promising number to see, considering PFF’s grading system is based on the film.
Rodgers also produced 7.4 net yards per attempt, which is an impressive number.
Net yards per attempt is a metric that accounts for sacks, making it more well-rounded than standard yards per attempt. Rodgers’ standard yards per attempt was 8.0 (167 yards on 21 attempts), ranking 10th in Week 1, but since he only took one sack for 5 yards, he placed one spot higher in net yards per attempt, ranking 9th at a sparkling 7.4 (162 net yards on 22 sacks-plus attempts). For perspective, that is higher than his career average (6.8) and would be the fifth-best season-long mark of his career.
Rodgers was efficient on a per-play basis. He just didn’t get enough opportunities to expand on that efficiency, resulting in his lackluster totals of 167 passing yards and 1 touchdown.
Many factors led to Rodgers dropping back only 22 times. Most importantly, San Francisco held the ball for over 38 minutes, causing Rodgers to spend long stretches of time on the bench. There was a nearly 13-minute stretch of game time where the Jets offense did not run a play, ranging from 5:34 remaining in the second quarter until 7:39 in the third. Since halftime was a part of that, it was an outrageous amount of real-world time for the offense to be sidelined.
On top of the defensive woes, multiple Jets drives ended early due to non-Rodgers issues. The Jets’ first two offensive drives of the game ended due to miscues on two consecutive offensive snaps: a Lazard third-down drop followed by a Breece Hall first-down fumble.
When you watch the film, look at the underlying metrics, and apply context, it is evident that Rodgers played solid football in this game. The national media never has time for nuance, though, so Rodgers is getting shellacked right now due to his modest box-score stats and the ugly final score.
Those critics are ignoring the real story of this game: Aaron Rodgers showed up for the Jets, but the Jets did not show up for Aaron Rodgers.
New York will win a lot of games with this level of quarterback play
In many ways, Rodgers looked like a quarterback who’s still got it. No, he did not look like the MVP version of himself, but he looked like a great game manager. If the Jets had the level of quarterbacking Rodgers provided last night for all 17 games in 2022 and 2023, they probably would have won at least 10 games each year.
“But the Jets didn’t get Aaron Rodgers from him to be a ‘great game manager’!”
Two of the last four quarterbacks standing in the 2023 playoffs were great game managers (Brock Purdy and Jared Goff). Purdy nearly won the Super Bowl and shredded the Jets’ (supposedly) elite defense last night. The idea that you can only win a Super Bowl with an “alien” quarterback is misguided. With Rodgers playing the way he did last night, there is no limit to how far New York can go if the rest of the team plays up to its potential.
And this is likely Rodgers’ floor. With more time to reacclimate to live game action, more time to build chemistry with his teammates, and Mike Williams’ gradual acclimation into the offense, Rodgers should only get more explosive as the season goes on.
For now, the Jets can sleep well knowing that Rodgers’ physical capabilities are still intact after the Achilles injury. That question mark is out of the way; they are not dealing with a Kirk Cousins situation, where the quarterback clearly looks like a shell of himself post-Achilles.
We still have to see if Rodgers can stay durable throughout the season, and whether there will be any physical deterioration as the year progresses. At this point in time, Rodgers looks like a solid starting quarterback, and that’s all the Jets should need with the supporting cast they have around him.
Unfortunately, on this particular night, the aforementioned supporting cast didn’t show up, hanging Rodgers out to dry on national television. But Rodgers played well within what he could control, and that should provide plenty of inspiration for Jets fans going forward. New York will win a lot of games if Rodgers continues playing as well as he did last night.
