Oh, the horror! The New York Jets are parting ways with a 41-year-old quarterback who is coming off a season where he ranked 25th out of 32 quarterbacks in QBR!
Despite Aaron Rodgers’ lack of production (and winning) in New York, there is a prevailing narrative that the Jets’ new regime threw away the team’s chances of being competitive in 2025 when they decided to part ways with the four-time MVP. “How can I continue rooting for this team?”, asked some fans after the Jets let go of a quarterback who averaged fewer yards per attempt than Mason Rudolph, Will Levis, Joe Flacco, and Jameis Winston last year.
If you ask most fans from the pro-Rodgers side, their argument usually has less to do with how good Rodgers currently is and more to do with the Jets’ alternatives. Just about any fan will admit Rodgers had a disappointing 2024 season and is not close to the quarterback he once was. But many fans wanted Rodgers back because they believe he is still a significantly better player than the alternative stopgap options the Jets can pursue this offseason as a bridge to their eventual franchise quarterback.
Is that true, though?
While the Jets’ options at quarterback this offseason are certainly limited, they are not remotely as uninspiring compared to Rodgers as many seem to believe. That is the prevailing fallacy in the ongoing conversations about New York’s quarterback situation: the gap between Rodgers and the Jets’ alternatives is small at worst, and at best, they could be upgrades.
Seen below is a scatter plot via the analytics website RBSDM. It shows 74 qualified quarterbacks (min. 150 plays) plotted by their EPA per play (expected points added) and CPOE (completion percentage over expected) from 2022-24. The size of the dots represent the number of plays.
I have highlighted Rodgers and three of the quarterbacks who appear to be among the likeliest candidates to replace him in 2025: Justin Fields, Marcus Mariota, and Tyrod Taylor.
Here is a breakdown of how each quarterback landed where they did:
- Aaron Rodgers: 0.047 EPA per play (31st), -1.1 CPOE (45th)
- Justin Fields: 0.029 EPA per play (33rd), -0.2 CPOE (36th)
- Marcus Mariota: 0.113 EPA per play (16th), 1.4 CPOE (23rd)
- Tyrod Taylor: 0.064 EPA per play (28th), 5.6 CPOE (2nd)
In terms of composite performance between EPA and CPOE, the rankings were as follows:
- Aaron Rodgers: 35th
- Justin Fields: 36th
- Marcus Mariota: 17th
- Tyrod Taylor: 16th
Are the Jets really punting on 2025 by parting ways with Rodgers?
Obviously, sample size is an enormous factor here. Rodgers’ data sample includes 1,306 plays. Mariota is at 516 while Taylor is at 285.
Fields, though, had 1,351 plays. So, that argument is off the table for this particular comparison. At similar sample sizes, Fields had almost identical efficiency to Rodgers. Considering he is 15 years younger and likely to keep improving while Rodgers is likely to keep declining, it seems to be a no-brainer that Fields is a better option than Rodgers in a vacuum. At the bare minimum, they are comparable.
As for Mariota and Taylor, it is absolutely fair to suggest that their efficiency numbers are inflated by their smaller sample sizes. It is unlikely they maintain such a high level of efficiency over 17 starts.
However, they are so far ahead of Rodgers in efficiency that even if they dropped 15-20 spots on the leaderboard across a larger sample size, they would still be similarly efficient to him. Does Rodgers’ sample size really prove anything in his favor when all it shows is that he has become reliable at being mediocre? At least Mariota and Taylor have shown flashes of well-above-average play over the past three seasons, which means there is some degree of chance they could maintain it and prove to be an upgrade over the decrepit Rodgers.
The final and perhaps most important factor in this conversation is scheme fit. We have only looked at the numbers in a vacuum so far, but expectations must be adjusted based on how the player fits in his particular environment.
As we broke down earlier this offseason in an article that published before the announcement of Rodgers’ (pending) release, Rodgers projects as a poor fit in the scheme of offensive coordinator Tanner Engstrand. In many areas, his preferences are the polar opposite of what worked so well for Engstrand’s Detroit Lions, for whom he was the passing game coordinator.
The Lions love pre-snap motion and throwing over the middle. Rodgers tends to be averse to those things. Meanwhile, Rodgers loves throwing go routes and spreading the offense out with three receivers, two things Detroit does at very low rates.
Rodgers’ production from 2022-24 was accumulated in offenses that were very much handcrafted to his liking. In Engstrand’s offense, he’d project to trend downward from his already-uninspiring numbers.
Conversely, all three of Fields, Mariota, and Taylor project as excellent fits in Engstrand’s offense, as we broke down earlier this week. Fields has always preferred throwing over the middle as opposed to the outside, while play action has helped him limit interceptions. Mariota has electric numbers as a middle-of-field and play-action passer. Taylor’s play action passing is a concern, but his middle-of-field passing is outstanding.
It is a fallacy that Rodgers is definitively better than the Jets’ top candidates to replace him. This is not to say the Jets’ replacement for Rodgers is guaranteed to be better than him. By all means, the Jets could turn to one of these three quarterbacks, and they could bomb. In no way can anybody claim that the likes of Fields, Mariota, and Taylor are definitely better than Aaron Rodgers, even at this stage of his career.
The point is that Rodgers is comparable to the Jets’ alternatives, which is quite a distant reach from the apparent public consensus. The way some fans and media members discuss the topic, you would think the Jets are tanking. In reality, they can easily find a bridge quarterback who is capable of matching or beating the mediocre efficiency that Rodgers has provided since 2022.
