Aaron Rodgers Is Not Having Fun Out There

If you take the New York Jets aspect out of the thing, and then further strip a bunch of really crucial context from it, it is easy to see how Jets fans might have been optimistic about this season. The roster is as talented as any Jets team in recent memory, with the crew of Emotional Support Teammates that the team furnished Aaron Rodgers with last season mostly turned over in favor of more obviously NFL-grade contributors; Rodgers himself is as healthy as any 40-year-old NFL quarterback could be, which does not necessarily rise to the level of physical wellness traditionally associated with the word "healthy" but has mostly allowed him to stay on the field and intermittently do Aaron Rodgers-style football stuff; the defense, while depleted after some typically avant-garde front-office maneuvering during the offseason, has the personnel to be good. In the abstract, the Jets are the sort of team that even reasonable fans could talk themselves into. In another, much more urgent, literal, and less abstracted sense, they remain the New York Jets.

That the Jets found a way to lose to the Minnesota Vikings in London on Sunday is less surprising with that in mind. The defense played its second straight excellent game, stymieing a Vikings offense that had been one of the NFL's best and effectively turning Sam Darnold back into the forlorn figure he was during his tenure with the Jets. But that Jetsian aura, a fragrant greenish fug in which all Jets games have been played for roughly the last decade and a half, affects everyone on the field. And on Sunday, even as the Jets defense succeeded in turning the game at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium into the unloveliest possible demonstration of American football, Aaron Rodgers was absolutely lost in it.

The game had all the hallmarks of watching circa-now Rodgers. There were moments of his old mastery, which remain one of the most potent highs in watching sports, and longer and very different moments in which Rodgers looked disconcertingly like a 40-year-old quarterback learning and running a Nathaniel Hackett offense while being chased by people who wish him ill. Both are real enough, but the proportions are currently way off. It's possible to imagine the ratio between the two shifting somewhat in the Jets' advantage as the season goes on; again, this is the sort of thing that even a reasonable fan could believe. But it is a lot easier to believe it if you don't watch the Jets play.

When the Jets offense is not working, as in the first half of Sunday's game, plays do not so much fail as fail to begin. Rodgers and his receivers seem to be operating independently of one another, with neither half of that binary doing so very happily or very well. Of the three interceptions that Rodgers threw on Sunday, the first-half pick-six to Andrew Van Ginkel that wound up providing the margin of victory was the most momentous, and in its delirious laser beam aesthetics the one that most recalled Zach Wilson's work. It was bad, but the pick that Rodgers threw to Stephon Gilmore during the Jets' last, unsuccessful comeback attempt was both the worst-timed and the one that most sums up Rodgers' struggles so far. Rodgers and receiver Mike Williams seemed to be executing parallel but slightly different routes; the result seemed like a route designed for Gilmore much more than Williams.

For the second week in a row, Rodgers was beaten down and chased around by a blitz-intensive defense. The Broncos, who sacked Rodgers five times last week, blitz more frequently than any other NFL team; the Vikings, who blitzed Rodgers on 42 percent of his dropbacks and sacked him three times and picked him off once in those 21 plays, are right behind them. Rodgers, who said after the game that he sustained a low ankle sprain against the Vikings, spent a good percentage of this game in obvious discomfort—grimacing or crawling around or being helped up or helped off. His best drive of the day came after a roughing the kicker penalty on Minnesota gave the ball back to the Jets before Rodgers had limped all the way to the medical tent. This looks bad laid out like that, but it looks far worse in motion.

The missed connections in the passing game have hurt Rodgers and the Jets, but also made the team's offensive issues harder to parse—it's hard to tell how well an offense is or is not working when the parties running it seem to have such crucially different ideas of what that would look like. More than that, Rodgers spends so much of every drive hitting the most anguished possible version of The Jim Face. Is Rodgers grimacing about his receivers not doing what he expects them to do, or at the realization that he is now truly Playing For The Jets in both the literal and figurative senses? Is it a reflection of his physical pain—asked after the game about his health, Rodgers mentioned after that "there's a lot of things that made some noises"—or some deeper malaise, the kind of disconnection and desperation that makes a man hold forth at length on the germ theory of disease on a podcast hosted by a man named Jeg.

There is no reason to rule any of those out, but the confluence of all of them, and the extent to which Rodgers appears to be suffering in a purgatory that exists both within but somehow distinct from the broader Jetsian one in which he is also trapped, seems to have made him somehow more unreachable than usual. "They're crazy," Hackett said of the Vikings defense last week. "I mean, they want to bring five every single play, and it's something that we're going to have to have great communication with everybody across the board." Rodgers is communicating, all right, and the messages he's sending are hard to miss, but he does not really seem to be engaged in any sort of meaningful conversation with this coaches or teammates. From one moment to the next, Rodgers can look like himself or just like someone who wishes he was elsewhere, but he never really looks like someone who can be talked to.