There’s a list of things that are more important to Aaron Rodgers than playing quarterback. The first one is that you pay attention to him, above all else. That’s why he has his weekly Viking horn on Pat McAfee’s Douche Emporium For Chads, where he can vocal vomit a decent percentage of the world’s pollution into the atmosphere. The second is protecting the image of himself as one of the greatest QBs of all time (which he is), but seeing as how he can’t reach that level anymore on the field he’ll shroud that by talking more and more. And the third thing is making sure everyone thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room, which he very much isn’t. These get intertwined and influence each other in all kinds of ways, but that’s what’s on his vision board these days. Football probably still matters somewhere in there, but it’s trailing.
Even though Rodgers thinks it’s a big deal that he’s now admitting he won’t play this season, anyone who thought about this in any logical manner and knows what Rodgers is, essentially a PR firm for Aaron Rodgers, knew this as soon as he crumpled to the turf in Week 1.
Rodgers didn’t have anything to gain by playing, but he had a whole lot to gain by putting it in the air that he might, just might. Rodgers getting back to the field would have only proven that he’s not what he was, and hasn’t been for a couple years now. Or it would have proven that whatever method of recovery he found on an internet search “recovery methods designed by the dumbest cults in history” didn’t actually work. And mostly, that he’ll never be the QB that he was, and that he’ll never quite make up for the underwhelming end and the insufficient amount of trophies from his days in Green Bay. These are things he’ll run from, as best as he can on one foot, for as long as he can.
But by hinting that he might come back, if only the Jets would live up to his level, then he can throw everyone off the scent of everything above. He can act like he might be the hero, like he might save the Jets. It’s not that Rodgers’s body broke down at 40, ya see. He could have played, he could have risked it all, if only the Jets had made it worth it for him to do so. But they didn’t, so now he can dine out on what “might have been.” Which is all he has at the moment, or soon will. Hell, he’s kinda been dining out on “what might have been” in Green Bay. It certainly was never his fault.
And now come training camp in July, Rodgers will be one of the biggest stories once again in the league. Maybe he can still be effective in his 40s coming back from a major injury, maybe he can’t. If it’s the latter, Rodgers will make sure everyone knows that it would have been better this season had the Jets earned his return, and that it’s just too hard to come back at that age after a full year off. Maybe he can still play enough to make the Jets just good enough to break their fans’ hearts again and he’ll still point to how much better it would have gone in 2023. He can’t lose.
Which is just how he wants it, and works very hard to make happen. The cycle will start again in July.
We’re gonna miss Steph Curry when he’s gone
There seems to be a lot of noise during the NBA’s In-Season Tournament about how it turned stale, cumbersome regular-season games into rare barnburners. Which is patently ridiculous, because there are always NBA regular-season games that are really good that pop up a couple teams a week. Get two good teams playing well in a close game, it’s still highly entertaining and doesn’t need a made-up label to make it so.
Yes, the Golden State Warriors aren’t good this season, at least not yet. But they and the Celtics had a heavyweight fight of a game last night, that was capped off by this:
I’ll never get tired of watching Steph make these shots. The ones with an impossibly quick release that put Ali’s phantom punch into slow motion and an arc and angle that he made up which every calculation of would cause graphing calculators to explode that almost always happen with the game on the line.
The Warriors might not matter soon. Maybe they don’t matter now. There will be other players who take over games and do things that make us kick our heels up on the couch. But no one’s going to do it like Steph, where both opponents and fans feel as if they’re being overwhelmed and standing in the middle of an avalanche, the shots coming from anywhere and everywhere, and in any possible fashion. It’s surrealist, and I hope it never ends. Perhaps knowing the end is close gives last night an extra sharpness.
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