1 week Ago By Steve Serby
SANTA CLARA — No one knew for certain what to expect from the 40-year-old future first-ballot Hall of Fame quarterback of the Jets when his 20th NFL season began on opening Monday Night against the 49ers. Would he, could he, be anything close to the Same Old Aaron Rodgers? The four-time MVP Aaron Rodgers and one-time Super Bowl champion. Or would he be the Same Older Rodgers? The 26 TD-12 INT 2022 Aaron Rodgers who could not reach 4,000 passing yards for the first time in five seasons or get the 2022 Packers into the playoffs.
He had captured imaginations in his first Jets summer whipping the ball around the way he did, the way few could, until that fateful opening 9/11 night at MetLife Stadium when his left Achilles betrayed him after the fourth play, and his season and their season were gone with the wind. He willed his way back to the game he feared he would never again play and inspired his teammates and coaches as he did and once again mesmerized everyone around the team in his second Jets summer, whipping the ball around the way he did, the way few can. Rodgers telling us he expected greatness apparently was his way of convincing himself that his arm and his mind are still elite, and that he can still survive the physicality of angry predators and the rigors of his position when the bullets started flying around him.
“You still wonder ‘Can I go out there and do it?’ until you’ve done it,” he told ESPN’s Alex Smith. “I was telling one of the coaches, ‘Every day I gotta remind myself I’m great.’ I gotta go out there and remind myself I can do this.
” And so the intrigue that has accompanied him through his Packers divorce and darkness retreats to his Robert F. Kennedy Jr. friendship to his unfathomable MNF nightmare 2023 Jets debut, to blowing off mandatory minicamp for riding camels in Egypt, followed him to his second MNF opener as Jets quarterback in this emotional return to the hometown team that passed on him to draft Smith first overall in 2005: Now a 40-year-old quarterback with a rehabilitated Achilles who last completed a pass that mattered on Jan.
8, 2023. Now a 40-year-old quarterback with a rehabilitated Achilles who hoped to lean on RB Breece Hall, on the ground and in the air, to help him chip off the rust. Now a 40-year-old quarterback with a rehabilitated Achilles with a fortified offensive line that was intent on keeping him upright.
“Not a lot of people would be willing to fight through that, but he definitely has,” RG Alijah Vera-Tucker told The Post. “When you have someone like that, you can’t help but want to play hard for him.” When you have someone like that, you damn well better.
“I’d say he looks about 20-something out there the way he’s been throwing the rock,” Vera-Tucker said. “I don’t know about the running though, I can’t say too much about that (smile). But that’s how you know you gotta keep clean pockets for our boy.
” This much his teammates knew: Whatever kind of impact he would ultimately make in this game on the Levi’s Stadium Field, he had already changed the complexion and the culture of the organization in a way that few other than Tom Brady’s former teammates would understand. “He’s extremely perceptive, he’s extremely empathetic, he understands people, and he tries to get to know them and know how to interact with them,” Solomon Thomas told the Post. “He doesn’t treat everybody the same.
He tries to get to know what motivates you, how you communicate, what’s the best way to interact with you to try to make you the best person? He does it with every individual from the practice squad players to the best players on the team. It’s so cool to see a player of his caliber want to get to know everyone, want to get to impact them. I’ve never been a part of anything like it, it’s really cool.
” From the moment Rodgers walked into the Atlantic Health Jets Training Center, he honored the obligation of the franchise quarterback by holding everyone accountable and raising the standard of everyone in the organization so much so that they shrugged at his unexcused minicamp absence. This was Rodgers before the start of his kneecapped 2023 season: “I do set little personal goals. I don’t share them publicly, but I don’t look at this like I have to bounce back or do anything.
I’ve just got to play the way I know how to play. I’ve been working my ass off for the last six months to try to put a better product on the field than last year, and I expect to.” An anxious, desperate fan base — and a regime that needs him to be its savior — turned its lonely eyes to you, Aaron Rodgers.
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