Trump Won, So We’ll Settle for Aaron Rodgers Schadenfreude

Photo: Chris Coduto/Getty Images

Last week, it looked like a narcissistic, past-his-prime, science-denying, self-aggrandizing serial liar might finally get the public comeuppance he so obviously deserved.

Okay, so it didn’t happen in politics, to the country’s detriment. But at least it is happening — albeit on a much smaller, less consequential scale — in sports.

On Sunday afternoon, the Aaron Rodgers New York Jets experiment hit its nadir. A week after their lone good win of the season, against the Houston Texans on Halloween, the Jets were clobbered by the perennial laughingstock Arizona Cardinals, 31-6. It wasn’t as close as the score indicated. New York’s defense couldn’t stop anyone. Their offense barely moved. Overall, the Jets looked like they were very ready for their season to be over, even with two months left to go. “We’re playing like trash,” Jets receiver Garrett Wilson said, but the thing about trash is that eventually someone takes it away. Football fans have to keep looking at the Jets.

Wilson, along with many other Jets, has had to speak out about the team’s plight because Rodgers — a man who hardly has a reputation as a shrinking violet — was suddenly tight-lipped. After one of the worst games of his career, in which he threw for only 135 yards and was obviously hesitant to take any risks downfield despite his team’s deficit, Rodgers met the media and got all demure. “There’s been a lot of emotions this year, for sure,” he said, and when reporters followed up by asking if he could, you know, name a couple of those emotions, he headed to the fainting couch. “I’m not going to [elaborate],” he said. “A lot of different emotions. That’s a loaded answer, but it’s not the time or the place to get into that right now. But at some point, I’ll give you a better answer.” This show-a-little-leg-but-just-a-little maneuver is a Rodgers specialty — it’s how he got away with lying about his vaccine status three years ago and is part of a general strategy to make himself seem more interesting than he actually is. But it works a lot better when you’re the league MVP, not a man playing the final few games of his career — a faded, limping version of the player you once were.

Rodgers is not the Jets’ only problem. But he was seen as the team’s final missing piece when he arrived in 2023, which upped the pressure to deliver — and which put his failure to do so in starker relief. Rodgers tore his Achilles in the season opener last year, a career-altering injury for any athlete but absolutely devastating for a man in his 40s. Since his return at the beginning of this season, he has put up career lows in every statistical category. He has more interceptions than in all but three of his 20 seasons, and this one is only barely half over. His yards-per-passing-attempt is the lowest it’s ever been, and his accuracy, always the strength of his game, has fallen through the floor. But you don’t need stats to understand how awful Rodgers has been: Just watch the games. He limps around the pocket, crumples immediately when hit, and seems to refuse to throw the ball deep downfield despite the Jets bringing in every receiving reinforcement Rodgers has demanded, including Davante Adams, his former teammate in Green Bay. He looks old, tired, grouchy, and in pain — which is to say, he looks like just about every other white guy in his 40s I know. The man is, as they say, washed.

This is hardly unique to Rodgers, and not self-evidently his fault either — we all get old. The problem is that Rodgers strutted into New York loudly certain that he was the savior for the long-suffering franchise and jettisoned anyone who stood in his way. That included coach Robert Saleh, whom he shoved during a game — he later gave a bullshit explanation for doing so — then pressured owner Woody Johnson to fire. The Jets have gotten much worse since Saleh’s dismissal, and now the entire house of cards has collapsed. (Saleh, meanwhile, became a consultant for the Packers, Rodgers’s old team. Unlike the Jets, they’re heading to the playoffs.) Rodgers is ending his career naked and alone, on a losing team that he made actively worse, hiding behind his teammates and pretending that he can still play silly public-relations games during press conferences, as if he is still the center of the football universe. Which he is decidedly not.

So Rodgers is two months away from being just another retired athlete. And despite Fox’s TV ads hyping Tom Brady the Broadcaster, no one cares about a retired athlete. We all just move on; we always have, we always will. (Ask Derek Jeter, who once loomed larger than life and now, during World Series broadcasts, seems like just another dull dad at your kid’s birthday party.) Rodgers has spent the last five years making sure he’s at the center of every single conversation — remember when he claimed he turned down RFK Jr.’s offer of a VP slot? — and blaming everyone else for every bad thing that has happened to him. Now, refusing to be chastened, he no longer wants to talk. Perhaps he’s out doing his own research.

And thus he stands, at the end, a loser. Rodgers, who has convinced himself that he can do no wrong, who has lied almost nonstop for a decade, is at last about over. You can feel bad for him if you want. Or you can treat him like a hitman in Sin City: “No matter what you do to them, you don’t feel bad.” If you’re in the need to watch someone at last get what they had coming to them and didn’t get that schadenfreude you wanted from the election, Rodgers can provide it. You don’t have to worry about appeasing his voters or making peace with his supporters. You can just watch him suck. You can watch his football career wither away and die. That is now an option. Your call.