Hello Darkness, My Old Friend: Are the Jets Doomed Without Aaron Rodgers?
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I hope New York Jets fans really love the mid-tier Nicholas Cage oeuvre, because their status as Super Bowl contenders was Gone in 60 Seconds. Four plays into his debut as the Jets’ franchise savior, Aaron Rodgers went down clutching his ankle, and ended up leaving on a cart. While we don’t know at press time exactly how bad the injury is, the reports have it as an Achilles injury of some description, which would likely end Rodgers’ season.
Aaron Rodgers was injured and helped off the field on the first Jets drive vs. the Bills. pic.twitter.com/vtKHRW566V
— ESPN (@espn) September 12, 2023
This is an obvious disaster. There’s simply no way the Jets can stay competitive against the Bills and other top teams in the conference without the former-MVP quarterback they gave up so much to go get. Now, if you excuse me for a moment, I need to finish watching Monday Night Football.
THE ROOKIE XAVIER GIPSON WINS IT! #BUFvsNYJ pic.twitter.com/lC26hn74bm
— NFL (@NFL) September 12, 2023
Ahem. Well, OK then. Buffalo, are you quite alright? We’ll check in on you in a bit.
The Jets have had terrible luck at the quarterback position in recent years. For the past five years, they’ve had to turn to their backup within six games every season. Sam Darnold had mono, missing Week 2 in 2019, and was then shoulder soreness knocked him out of Week 4 in 2020. Zach Wilson was sprained his PCL in Week 7 in 2021, and a meniscus tear knocked him out of the beginning of last season. Turning to a backup in desperation has become an annual right of passage in New York.
In fact, scratch “recent years”. The Jets have been in this exact same situation before. In 1999, with Super Bowl aspirations, the Jets saw Vinny Testaverde go down in the season opener, rupturing his Achilles tendon and missing the rest of the season. In one of Bill Parcells’ finest coaching jobs, he managed to get a team quarterbacked by Ray Lucas and Rick Mirer to 8-8, just one game out of playoff position.
That time @nyjets punter Tom Tupa filled in at QB for an injured Vinny Testaverde. Tupa went 6-of-11 for 165 yards and 2 TDs. #TakeFlight (Sept. 12, 1999)#NEvsNYJ: Tonight at 8:15pm ET on ESPN pic.twitter.com/arkryv8gN4
— NFL Legacy (@NFLLegacy) October 21, 2019
The 2023 Jets did something their 1999 counterparts couldn’t do – actually win the game where they lost their presumptive starter. Can they one-up them even further by punching a ticket into the expanded playoffs? That’s what PlaySheet is designed to look at, after all.
As important as Aaron Rodgers is to the Jets, he is just one player out of 53. While there’s no denying that any projection of New York’s future has to rapidly change with Zach Wilson replacing him for the foreseeable future, Rodgers was not the only positive thing the Jets had going for them entering this season
Their defense played lights-out against Josh Allen and the Bills, backing up their second-ranked DVOA projection. Last season, they couldn’t buy a turnover, ranking 27th in turnovers per drive despite being a top-five defense overall. We already saw some regression back to the mean, with Jordan Whitehead picking Allen off three times and Quinnen Williams recovering a Sanchize-esque fumble from Allen late in the fourth quarter. Sauce Gardner and D.J. Reed are still a standout cornerback duo, they have oodles upon oodles of depth at pass rusher – none of this changes with Rodgers out. They’ll likely be placed in worse situations, sure, but a strong defense can serve as a backbone.
And even had Rodgers not arrived, there would have been some reason to hope for solid offensive improvement in 2023. That starts with getting a full season from Breece Hall, back after his exciting rookie season was cut short with a torn ACL. Garrett Wilson looks like a budding star, and there’s plenty of depth behind him with Allen Lazard and Mecole Hardman and Randall Cobb, et. al. The less said about the offensive tackles, the better, and Jets fans are cursing at the idea of suffering through another full season with Zach Wilson under center. But still, it’s not unreasonable to expect the Jets’ offense to be a little more competent in 2023 than they were in 2022. The Jets ranked 26th with a -9.6% offensive DVOA last season, but that rose to -1.7% in weeks when Breece Hall was healthy, and the rarified air of 2.9% when Hall and Zach Wilson were both playing, hitting the rarified air of “slightly above average”. A top five defense plus an offense which is there and not actively offensive to the eyes would probably go 11-6 in the NFC South; you can work with that.
The Jets, of course, don’t play in the NFC South. They play in the murder’s row that is the AFC, with the fourth-toughest projected schedule in the league per DVOA. What would it take for them to make the postseason in their actual situation, and can they pull it off?
First of all, a couple notes from Week 1. While we expect the AFC to be the stronger conference, it’s worth noting that they went 0-4 against the NFC last week, shuttling four precious wins out of conference and giving losses to Kansas City, New England, Pittsburgh and Tennessee – three legit teams who could be in the playoff picture and then also the Titans. In addition, the Jets win over Buffalo was a divisional win, the best you can do for tiebreakers. The Bills now can’t win the head-to-head tiebreaker over New York, and they’re one game up on Miami or New England should things come down to the divisional tiebreaker. They actually sit in first place in the AFC East at the moment thanks to this win, which we all expected when the cart was coming out for Rodgers, right?
Since 1990, the average win percentage for the seventh seed, or the team that would have been the seventh seed, is .556, or just under 9.5 wins in a 17-game season. It’s too early to say anything definitive about the strength of the AFC, but it’s fair to say that even in the strongest possible conference, 11 wins should clinch a playoff spot in all but the most awkward tiebreaking scenarios. And even if Week 1’s results are prologue to something bigger and the AFC is much, much worse than we think it could possibly be, it’s nigh-impossible for a seven-win team to make the postseason. So call it somewhere between 8-11 wins as a necessary mark to hit, with the Jets unable to feel comfortable unless they hit double digits. That means going 9-7 down the stretch with Wilson or whatever quarterback they’re able to pry free from someone else the rest of the way (Carson Wentz to the white courtesy phone?).
Prior to the Rodgers injury, that was no problem. Users on Playoff Predictors had the Jets going 11-6 on average, and that wasn’t including a win over Buffalo. That’s going to fall to Earth very, very quickly, but the starting point of 12 wins with Rodgers gives us a bit of a cushion to work with. Or, at least, it would, if the public wasn’t, shall we say, very high on the AFC in general. With their picks over the last week, plus Week 1’s actual results, they have the 11-6 Chargers missing the playoffs. The Wisdom of the Crowds collides head first into Any Given Sunday; good teams will occasionally lose to teams worse than them – the major AFC contenders all learned that lesson this week. There should be a stronger middle class than our predictors generally have. Let’s take their 12 wins from the Jets, and just use our 10-win goal as the benchmark for in and out, shall we?
Our users have the Jets beating, in order, the Patriots, Broncos, Giants, Chargers, Raiders, Dolphins, Falcons, Texans, Commanders, Browns and Patriots again to get to 12.
These picks still include data from before Sunday, and a couple of those picks might have changed this week even if Rodgers had stayed healthy. The Dolphins just put on an offensive showcase against the Chargers, and while their poor defense meant they only just beat Los Angeles, power rankings are going to see the Tua Tagovailoa to Tyreek Hill connection skyrocketing up over the next few weeks. Let’s flip that to a loss without questioning things too much. The Browns defense also showed out, preventing the Bengals high-flying offense from going anywhere. And while their offense struggled a little in the first half, they started getting things going late. Let’s pencil that one in as favoring Cleveland as well, especially seeing as it’s a short week on the road. Thursday Night Football is tough.
That leaves us with nine other games, with the Rodgersless Jets needing all of them to hit double-digits and feel good about their postseason chances.
The Broncos, Giants and Texans all seem like fairly safe bets, even with Wilson under center. The Giants just got finished absorbing one of the most lopsided beatdowns in NFL history; while they shouldn’t lose 40-0 every week, they looked hapless. The Jets’ pass rush should salivate at getting a shot at the Giants offensive line. The Broncos still haven’t shown they can hit 20 points as Sean Payton hasn’t proved to be an immediate magic elixir. And Houston is basically using this year as a developmental season, experimenting with a new only-horizontal offense. The Jets’ defense should cause them to be favored over these three, even if the offense crumbles into dust. Add that to the Buffalo win and we’re at four.
The next tier up are the Commanders, Raiders and Falcons. I have never been a Sam Howell believer, and seeing Washington nearly fall to the hapless Cardinals (six sacks! An interception! A Howell fumble recovered for a score!) did not exactly get me on their bandwagon. They do, however, have a formidable defensive line, and that could spell problem for the Jets’ troubled offensive line. Then you have the week’s least impressive winner in the Raiders, who benefitted from Denver being utterly unable to produce anything offensively, and still only one by one point. You could argue the Falcons should be in a tier higher than this because they rather comfortably beat Carolina, but they produced just 118 passing yards, much of that from YAC. The Jets might well hold Desmond Ridder and company to negative passing yards. If the Jets offense can perform similarly to how they did last season, I think it’s still fair to favor the Jets in these matchups, which gets us to seven wins.
That leaves us with the toughest matchups – the two Patriots games and the Chargers. New England was the most impressive loser in Week 1, as their defense clamped down enough to keep them in the game against the defending NFC champion Eagles. The Philly D was able to hassle and harry Mac Jones enough to ultimately come out on top; a recipe the Jets’ defense could duplicate. The Chargers, meanwhile, have an extremely potent offense and saw a rushing resurgence under Kellen Moore – both Austin Ekeler and Joshua Kelly topped 90 rushing yards, and they ran for 234 yards and three touchdowns as a team. Even the Jets defense may struggle with stopping that entirely, especially if Justin Herbert actually is allowed to throw the ball more than two yards downfield in the future. To keep up, we’ll need to see Wilson and the offense take forward strides from where they were when they were at their best last year. They’re not going to sweep this group with a top defense and a frustrating, at best, offense. They’ll need the ancillary pieces that were going to surround Rodgers to step up if they’re going to win matchups like this.
Ultimately? I think the Jets can stay in the race for the rest of the season. The Rodgers injury, while heartbreaking, still leaves the Jets with enough ammo to be competitive this season. Remember, they were 6-3 leading up to the bye last season; a weak 6-3 but 6-3 notwithstanding. The defense alone will keep them in matchups against teams that are far more talented on offense, at least on paper. And the Jets brought in enough interesting players around Rodgers offensively that we should still see some improvement over what we saw a year ago there.
But while they can be competitive, competitive isn’t going to get it done in the AFC. There’s just no margin for error squeaking into the postseason against the level of competition we expect them to face – heck, remember, the DVOA projections had them as a wildcard team despite being in the top five in DVOA, because their schedule is a nightmare in a nightmare of a conference. Put me down for the Jets pulling off their first winning season since 2015, and having positive building blocks going forward into the future…but ultimately coming up short, extending the longest playoff drought in the NFL.
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