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You knew Robert Saleh was in trouble as head coach when the guy running the New York Jets gave him a semi-vote of confidence last week.
“Rob and I have a great relationship; and we have since day one when I got here,” Aaron Rodgers said on The Pat McAfee Show. “He and I have text message conversations, threads that we’re in, conversations about a number of different topics outside of football. We have a good friendship.”
We have text message conversations, threads that we’re in.
So — yeah. Saleh was cooked.
Rodgers addressed the issue with McAfee because there was an issue to be addressed. (He’s also paid a stack of cash to appear on the show.) There is not an issue now. On Tuesday, the club let Saleh know that Rodgers would no longer require his services as coach.
The Jets had the owner, Woody Johnson, say the words that made Saleh’s firing official, but this was a Rodgers takeover and no surprise. Any team that wanted Rodgers as its quarterback, at this stage of the future Hall of Famer’s career, was also essentially agreeing to a one-way power structure. The Jets knew that.
None of this makes Rodgers a monster. He’s a 40-year-old quarterback who has an almost total sense of what he wants an offense that he directs to look like, and he’s an NFL player with a resume that strongly suggests he’s right a lot of the time.
The other formidable thing about Rodgers, though, is his feel for and command of the media. He has developed enough platforms for himself that he no longer needs a megaphone to be heard; he just has to pick his venue. The media will wait for him to speak and then report as though the words are coming from the mount.
When Rodgers didn’t love his absence being labeled “unexcused” by Saleh after he toured the pyramids in Egypt rather than appear at mandatory minicamp, he let it be known. The QB’s apparent brush-off of a bro-hug with Saleh during a Week 3 win over the Patriots got the Royal Family treatment. When Saleh suggested after a brutal loss to Denver that Rodgers’ sophisticated cadence at the line of scrimmage might need to be simplified, Rodgers replied that was “one way to do it. The other way is to hold (the Jets’ offensive players) accountable.”
That’s coach-y talk, the thing about holding guys accountable. Rodgers certainly thinks of himself as a player-coach at this point, and that’s not unreasonable. But his comments made for another brushfire in a season of too many flames under Saleh’s seat, and the QB is no dummy — he understands the power of his reach.
But that’s only a small part of the Aaron Rogers media experience. He’s gone viral for all sorts of reasons, only a few of them related to football.
There was his mischaracterization of his own Covid vaccination status, to say nothing of his embrace of fringe conspiracy theories about the virus and its vaccines. There were his enthusiastic conversations about using psychedelics, and how he “definitely thought about” becoming anti-vaxxer RFK Jr.’s running mate.
Rodgers is a person who deeply understands that his football fame has created for him a massive public interest in his thoughts – on just about anything he wants to spout, it turns out. Getting a problem with a football coach taken care of is small potatoes.
You could justify Robert Saleh’s firing in multiple ways, which is usually the case with a first-time head coach in the NFL. The Jets went 20-36 during Saleh’s tenure, their offense has mostly been putrid, and a loss to the Vikings in London last weekend dropped them to 2-3 this season.
As head coach, Saleh made a great defensive coordinator. That’s what he was with the San Francisco 49ers prior to his elevation in New York, and the Jets have consistently been one of the league’s toughest defenses under his leadership.
But he couldn’t solve the offense, and for that he’s getting speared. The acquisition of Rodgers in the spring of 2023 was supposed to accelerate an offensive reawakening. We’ll never know. Rodgers tore his achilles in Week 1 and was lost for the year. To date, he’s made six starts for the Jets in total.
That’s not enough time to make a dent, but more than enough for the full weight of Rodgers’ influence — both on the media and Jets ownership — to be felt. After firing Saleh on Tuesday, Woody Johnson went to great lengths to explain that his star quarterback had nothing to do with it. And the Aaron Rodgers show rolls on.
Mark Kreidler is a national award-winning writer whose work has appeared at ESPN, the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and dozens of other publications. He’s also a sports-talk veteran with stops in San Francisco and Sacramento, and the author of three books, including the bestselling “Four Days to Glory.” More of his writing can be found at https://markkreidler.substack.com. He is also reachable on Twitter @MarkKreidler.
