Mike Lupica: We need to slow down Super Bowl talk if desperate Jets land on desperate Aaron Rodgers

By now, we know all the reasons the Jets have to make this big deal with Aaron Rodgers. They hope he can do for them what Tom Brady did for the Bucs. And what Matthew Stafford did for the Rams. They know he has a lot more left than Peyton Manning when the Broncos won their first Super Bowl since John Elway, even if Peyton didn’t have much to do with it in the end.

At this point, even people in outer space know why the Jets are doing this, why they have to, as they try to become more than just a football irrelevance, not just in the league, but here.

But the adolescent idea that this is suddenly the Super Bowl or the bankruptcy of this particular Jets team turns out to be nonsense, whether Rodgers is here for a year or two or even longer than that.

Start here, because it’s as good a place to start as any:

Since Rodgers played in his only Super Bowl 12 years ago, he’s gone 0-for-4 in NFC championship games, against Seattle and Atlanta and San Francisco and Tampa Bay. And the Jets? Since they won their only Super Bowl 1,200 years ago, they’ve gone 0-for-4 in AFC championship games, against the Dolphins in the mud, against John Elway once in Denver, against the Colts and Steelers when Rex Ryan was Coach. In the case of Rodgers and the Jets, he could end up being the irresistible force and the immovable object. Unless both are the immovable object. And that object is history. Of him and of them.

Don’t get me wrong: I want this to happen, and not just for Jets fans, but just for the entertainment it will provide and the must-see of it all. I want it to happen even though it hasn’t yet. There’s always a big qualifier here: it’s the Jets. Things not only go wrong for them, but they often go straight into a ditch. If you don’t believe it, look at the last two quarterbacks they saw as dreams of building a dream:

Sam Darnold.

Zach Wilson.

But let’s say the deal goes through, and Rodgers becomes the No. 12 they’ve been looking for since Joe Namath was No. 12. We can already see what a show this will be, as well as being one of the great sports dramas. we’ve had in New York sports. Do you know why it’s going to be that kind of drama? Because desperate people often create big drama, and we have four desperate people involved in this one:

Woody Johnson.

joe douglas

Robert Saleh.

Aaron Rogers himself.

Call them Gang Green of Four.

The first three are the producers. Rodgers will be the star, as long as he’s here, and depending on how much he has left. But make no mistake: in their own way, they are all desperate characters.

( Antwan Staley: Aaron Rodgers and the Jets need each other because they both have something to prove )

Johnson is desperate to put points on the board for the first time since Rex was his coach and Mark Sanchez was enough of a quarterback to play in an AFC championship game as a rookie, and then do the same next year. Douglas and Saleh are easy. They’re just looking to keep the best jobs either of them will ever have in the NFL.

Then there’s Rodgers, who wants to be the coolest guy in the room (sometimes a dark room), but is absolutely desperate to win one more Lombardi Trophy; show that he can go to the Jets and do what Brady did when he went to the Bucs, and Stafford did with the Rams, and even Peyton, even pitching like he was left-handed at the end, helped the Broncos.

By the way? The Jets don’t just need a quarterback again. They need a star. Rodgers has been a star since he replaced Brett Favre, when the Jets made the same play for Favre that they are now trying to make with Rodgers. In his prime, while winning all those MVP awards and that Lombardi Trophy, he played the position as creatively and magically and as well as it’s ever been played in professional football.

But next December 2 he will be 40 years old. There’s only one quarterback that age (or older) who has made a difference on a Super Bowl-winning team, and that’s Brady. He was 41 years old when he won his last Super Bowl with the Patriots. He then went to Tampa and won another at age 44.

( Bob Raissman: Aaron Rodgers is obsessed with managing the message… ‘I’ll speak for myself’ )

It’s another area where Rodgers, as great as he’s been, and in his prime he’s been legendarily great, faces history. But if he ends up in Florham Park and ends up playing his home games at MetLife Stadium, he’ll be up against something else: the fact that the team he’ll join, despite all the promising talent it has on both sides of the ball , is being wildly overpriced. Because here’s another notion that’s also nonsense, even for the most giddy Jets fans:

That these Jets are one player away, him, from winning it all.

Spoiler alert: they are not.

Of course I want it (and though you can make a much better case for them to go hard after Lamar Jackson, even with his injury woes of late). Everyone wants to see Rodgers come here and try to change the boring, losing narrative around the Jets. It won’t just be fun to watch him try. It will be a lot of fun watching him try to save Douglas, who thought Zach Wilson was the answer. And give Saleh a chance to show that he’s a great head coach on both sides of the ball. And, if all goes well, Rodgers will finally make Johnson more than just the Other Owner of the Other Team in New York and New Jersey.

Get this: Rodgers will be signing a lot. But the realist Jets fans I know, there are some, don’t worry, they realize what they’re looking for here is a playoff comeback; the chance to play meaningful games in January again. I’m not saying the Jets can’t win a Super Bowl with Rodgers. The comp here is Matthew Stafford, and Stafford, on the best day of his life, was never the quarterback Rodgers has been.

There’s a lot to like about this, more likes than dislikes if you’re a Jets fan. But there are also a lot of things that could go wrong here. The Jets need to buy what Rodgers is selling.

Buyer beware. Of expectations, above all.

By the way?

There is no more powerful, and more lucrative, mystique in all of sports, and perhaps in the history of sports, than that the quarterback in the NFL is the most important position in the game. all sports

That’s why teams make big, and sometimes monumentally bad, bets on quarterbacks all the time.

The Jets did it with Darnold and Wilson.

The Giants are doing it with Daniel Jones, right now, giving him a contract that may be worth $160 million, much of that in a playoff win, even if it was impressive, against the Minnesota Vikings defense.

But the Cardinals did the same thing with Kyler Murray, who is never going to win a championship.

The Browns just did it with Deshaun Watson, who won the only title he’ll ever win at Clemson.

Everyone is still looking for the next Brady.

Or the next Mahomes.

The problem is that there may only be two of them in the modern world of professional soccer.

How could you not be happy for Princeton the other day?

How not to be happy for Furman?

And how could one not have a little heartbreak for Virginia’s Kihei Clark, who threw the ball to Furman late on and cost his team the season?

Four years ago, it was Clark who ran a ball late in an Elite Eight game against Purdue and flipped it to Mamadi Diakite, who made the shot that forced overtime in a game the Cavaliers ultimately won, en route to victory. . the national championship

They don’t win the title without Clark making a play and a pass like that.

Virginia fans, including those in the media, who attacked Clark after the Furman loss should remember that this weekend.

Or maybe forever.

This was one of Buck Showalter’s first reactions, Wednesday night, after Edwin Díaz injured his knee while celebrating Puerto Rico’s victory over the Dominican Republic in the World Baseball Classic:

“The teleprompter just broke.”

He meant that the script the Mets thought they had for this season, the one that included Diaz, had just gone out the window.

But again:

Mets fans should remember that Mariano Rivera tore his knee hitting fly balls in the outfield, missing the season in May.

Rafael Soriano became the closer for the Yankees that year.

He saved 42 games.

The Yankees won 95.

And he won the AL East without Mo.

Are we absolutely sure that The Masters is a tradition like no other?

In keeping with today’s main topic, aren’t the Jets a tradition like no other, too?

You’re going to love a crime novel called “Fixit” by my friend Joe Ide.

What happened to Kyrie?

“Ted Lasso” is back, and better than ever.

Carlos Alcaraz runs around a tennis court like Francisco Lindor runs around the bases.

My friend Stanton is warning Aaron Rodgers not to go all “RELAX” if he makes it to the Jets.

We don’t do that around here.

We are all Fairleigh Dickinson on Sunday.