I don’t believe I’ve ever been in a stadium or arena, or really any place like MetLife Stadium between 8 and 8:30 p.m. Monday night. It was louder than an airplane and had enough pyrotechnics to warrant sunglasses. It felt more like the Monsters of Rock stadium tour from the late 80’s than a football game. And then, like that, it ended, in perhaps the biggest mood swing since Hilary Clinton’s election night party in the Javits Center in 2016. Aaron Rodgers, the NFL’s most prominent quarterback and the assumed messiah for the New York Jets and their Super Bowl aspirations, fell to the turf at the end of his fourth play of scrimmage in the first regular season game of the season. More importantly, he didn’t get up, and eventually got the sideline before being carted off the field into the locker room. And even though the capacity crowd didn’t know exactly what just happened, they knew it wasn’t good. And it certainly wasn’t according to plan. That was affirmed when backup quarterback Zach Wilson took the field for the next Jets possession, leading most fans to concurrent try to wake up from a nightmare and scour social media to find out which armchair orthopedist might have the least pessimistic prediction for QB1.
That was Monday night for the New York Jets, an evening that was supposed to be their coming out party, the New Jets, and turned into the same old Gang Green in a series of yards. It is almost impossible to exaggerate the letdown of going from Rodgers to Wilson, from promised land to purgatory, in just four plays. And even as the Jets somehow managed to win the game in overtime against their fierce division rival Buffalo, you wouldn’t know it by the tenor in the building. Win or lose, it still felt like a funeral.
There are at two ways we can look in retrospect at the Aaron Rodgers tenure with the New York Jets. One is from the perspective of the team and its personnel decisions. The Tom Brady experiment may have distorted our sense of aging and reality when it comes to professional athletes. When Brady first went from New England to Tampa Bay and won a Super Bowl in his first season there at age 43, we all probably started to believe that Father Time wasn’t as undefeated as we once imagined. But for every Tom Brady, there are a thousand Tony Romos or Matt Ryans or even the great Peyton Manning, who led a Broncos team to a Super Bowl title at 39 in spite of his fading performance. Outstanding, all-star, hall of fame quarterbacks who at some point were not what they used to be. And more notably, were far more fragile than they once were. When the New York Jets signed Aaron Rodgers at age 39 to be their franchise quarterback, one that was already dealing with some injury problems over the past few seasons, they may have ignored the fact that what happened Monday night – while hard to fathom – probably wasn’t as much of a statistical anomaly as one might have believed.
Second, Rodgers’ injury and the according fan reaction is another reminder of the interplay between team success and identity and fan self-concept. If you sat in MetLife Monday night or listened to sports talk radio after the game – and I did both – you would have thought we just surrendered to Canada. People weren’t simply upset that Aaron Rodgers is out for the season. They’re upset because their entire sense of who they are, or who they might be at the end of the year, had changed in an instant. It looked like every other person in the building had a new #8 jersey on Monday night, what scholars refer to as basking in reflected glory, a glory that not only hadn’t happened yet, but now most certainly won’t – at least not with the same quarterback. So when Rodgers went down, it didn’t just ruin their team’s chance at a title. It seemed to also destroy everyone’s sense of who they were, from a fan base of destiny to simply the same old Jets. And we can talk about whether owners should put natural grass in every stadium or whether the Jets offensive line needed help, but in the end, this injury says a whole lot more about all of us than it does about Aaron Rodgers.
Hopefully Jets fans enjoyed their 30 minutes on Monday night. Because unlike rock concerts, there doesn’t appear to be an encore.
Keith Strudler is the director of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him on twitter at @KeithStrudler
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