The New York Jets acquired Davante Adams the morning after another largely punchless offensive performance in prime time, which was followed by Aaron Rodgers announcing at the podium that his veteran wide receiver ran the wrong route on a game-ending interception. Of course they did. There was no other option.
The Jets are sitting at 2–4, already circling the exterior of being called one of the loudest disasters certainly in franchise history but also in modern NFL history. Had the Jets simply allowed Adams to be traded elsewhere, owner Woody Johnson would forever wear the dreaded scarlet letter of frugality; that he chose to go most of the way in but winced when it came to paying a 30-plus-year-old wide receiver at the top of the market for a little more than half a season and parting with affordable draft picks in order to do so.
The team’s predicament is a bit like the plot of the Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn comedy Wedding Crashers. When one falls deeply into something, it doesn’t seem that strange to be in a situation where you are procuring a waiter’s uniform to sneak into another woman’s engagement party, or continue masquerading as a venture capitalist in order to steal her away from her fiancé. In terms of sound team building, this is a situation that would make most general managers wince. However, Johnson fell for Rodgers, which made the next aggressive move and all of those that followed make some degree of sense. As Vaughn says, “Grab that net and catch that beautiful butterfly.”
Let’s discuss the many tentacles of this deal, ranging from the financial to the political to the emotional.
Repeating old mistakes
While I am not surprised, I do think this particular signing shows that Johnson lacks the ability to learn from recent history. The 2009 and ’10 Jets were the best rosters of Johnson’s tenure, and the team simply tore off its internal governor and began wildly collecting star veteran players to push the team over the hump once it reached the AFC championship game. Some examples: LaDainian Tomlinson, Derrick Mason, Plaxico Burress, Santonio Holmes, Jason Taylor and Trevor Pryce. The locker room became a cocktail reception for the best players from Madden NFL 06. I remember the weight that these acquisitions put on developing young quarterback Mark Sanchez and the absolute chaos that followed when Mason was cut, Holmes eventually bailed on the team and was pulled from the huddle for a final drive of a still-meaningful game, and the entire locker room began pointing fingers.
This occurred under Rex Ryan, and Ryan—say what you will about him—had excellent interpersonal skills. This was a team he wanted to coach and was born to coach. However, even he struggled to keep a grip on the emotional tornado brewing in that locker room between the stalwarts and the newcomers, the offense and the defense, the young and the old, the Rex guys and the outcasts.
Jeff Ulbrich is an interim head coach who is already tasked with learning one of the most complex jobs in American professional sports on the fly. He’s already made a coordinator change. Now, his office door will be open to a rotating cast of potentially mercurial veterans, all of whom have seen a lot of football and will be comfortable weighing in on the situation. Just think of the staggering number of non-homegrown players who are now major, inseparable parts of this offense:
• Aaron Rodgers
• Mike Williams
• Allen Lazard
• Tyron Smith
• C.J. Mosley
• Morgan Moses
• Davante Adams
• John Simpson
Ulbrich is a former player with a long and respected history in that regard. In order to keep this balanced, his performance in the head coaching chair is going to have to be nothing short of legendary and while I believe he is capable of that based on conversations I’ve had with folks who know him well, it’s a really difficult position for Johnson to put his promising interim coach.
Effect on Garrett Wilson
Now, let’s talk about the effect this could have on non-veteran players, specifically third-year receiver Garrett Wilson. During the team’s Week 5 loss to the Minnesota Vikings in London, there was a not-insignificant amount of talk on the broadcast about Wilson running more patient routes. Broadcasters, unless they derive this from their own film study, get this information from the other people on the team that they talk to during the week. I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume that there is a way Rodgers would like Wilson to play versus a way that Wilson is still learning to play. Wilson was targeted a staggering 23 times during the team’s loss to Minnesota, which I thought was an invaluable and necessary bit of growing pain in order to expedite the process of getting both the quarterback and wideout on the same page.
Now that Adams is there, already steeped in Rodgers’s shorthand, what happens to that progress? Adams gobbled up targets when he and Rodgers played together in Green Bay. Adams had 169 targets during his final season with the Packers, which was 109—one hundred and nine—more than the team’s next-most targeted wideout. That next receiver? Lazard.
At some point, likely within the next year or two, Rodgers and Adams will be gone and this will all have been a strange and possibly pleasurable fever dream. The players who are going to be left to formulate the foundation of this team are the ones, such as Wilson, who could end up being squeezed out in order to make room for a receiver Rodgers is more comfortable with in the interim.
Like the Zach Wilson development story, in which Rodgers was supposed to simultaneously mentor the former wayward top-three pick and have him ready to succeed him following the conclusion of his short tenure, the Rodgers acquisition was supposed to be a salve for all the team’s issues. Instead, it seems to be compromising long-term development in a way that could have some deleterious effects down the road.
Of course, Wilson could thrive when more coverage is rolled toward Adams, but I would point to the fact that Wilson is already doing a pretty good job of getting open and gaining separation. His average separation on routes is 3.2 yards according to NextGenStats, which is almost identical to that of … Adams this year (3.1) and Adams (3.0) during his final year with Rodgers in Green Bay.
Optically, this was a move the Jets had to make because they are a victim of their own impatience. But if they had taken a more holistic, long-term view, Wilson could have absolutely been the player Adams already is for Rodgers.
Rodgers’s timeline
Right now, the Jets are 2–4 with another prime-time game Sunday night against the Pittsburgh Steelers. No doubt, their focus is on just winning this one. The beauty of what the Jets have constructed is that from now on they will be a prisoner of the moment. Looking down the road will only cause nausea.
But when the haze finally clears, they will have to wrestle with a handful of obvious questions:
• What assurances has Rodgers given them, if any, that acquiring Adams will increase the likelihood of his own return in 2025, when he will be 41 and turning 42?
• How do the Jets plan on satisfying the back end of the Adams contract that they just inherited, which includes two unpayable, nonguaranteed seasons at a higher salary than Justin Jefferson is making in Minnesota?
• If Adams and Rodgers have committed to coming back in 2025, or if that is the plan, how does that square with the idea that, again, the team is being piloted by an interim coach? And if Johnson is equally as impatient with Ulbrich as he was with Robert Saleh, who is going to eagerly take this job in 2025 to coach a team clearly being led by the quarterback and must carry along with him all of the creature comforts that make him happy. This includes role players and assistant coaches that would seem to be non-negotiables.
It would seem that, with this trade, Johnson has just hemmed himself into a situation where Ulbrich is one of his precious few options should this iteration of the team continue.
Now, if these moves are all for 2024 and Rodgers and Adams are completing a last dance of sorts, let’s look at how the house of cards comes collapsing in on itself.
QB: ?
RB: Breece Hall and Braelon Allen
WR: Garrett Wilson and Malachi Corley
TE: Jeremy Ruckert
LT: Olu Fashanu
LG: John Simpson (maybe?)
C: Joe Tippmann
RG: Alijah Vera-Tucker
RT: ?
The team will also probably win enough games with Rodgers and Adams together—the New England Patriots, Jacksonville Jaguars and Miami Dolphins (twice) remain on the schedule, in addition to winnable games against the Indianapolis Colts, Arizona Cardinals and Los Angeles Rams—that it will be out of the running for a top-five pick and unable to immediately replace Rodgers via the draft without surrendering more picks (a stable of picks that was compromised by the Adams trade).
With the interim head coach on an interim contract and the general manager operating under an expiring contract, these may be problems for someone else to solve.
Haason Reddick
The Haason Reddick piece adds a wrinkle to the situation that would allow general manager Joe Douglas to look like he salvaged a distressed asset. While I am not sure the Jets will get back what they traded for Reddick—a conditional third-round pick—I do think the Jets could get enough of a return to defray the cost of the Adams trade and make it look less like they are simply firing future assets out of a cannon and into the sun.
The pass-rushing market is developing nicely for the Jets, though Reddick is a unique asset; a player who is most valuable to defensive teams that already have a stout interior and an edge-setting defensive end that would allow Reddick to play freely and rush the passer.
How far can these Jets go?
The ultimate question both Johnson and Douglas have to be asking themselves now is: Will it be worth it? And what does “worth it” really mean?
The Jets are currently 22nd in EPA per play on offense and 11th on defense. The last time Rodgers and Adams played together, the Packers were third in EPA per play offensively, Rodgers was cementing his second consecutive (and fourth overall) MVP award, and the offense was behind only Tom Brady’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Patrick Mahomes’s Kansas City Chiefs in terms of efficiency.
That team lost its first playoff game, in the divisional round, to the San Francisco 49ers. Rodgers was 20-of-29 for 225 yards and no touchdowns. The Packers scored 10 points. While we could make an argument about which team was better in terms of the totality of talent, the 2021 Packers or the ’24 Jets, Green Bay was also operating with one of the most revered coaching staffs in the NFL and a stable of developed homegrown talent.
One would assume that putting the team through all of this attrition, risking the development of one of the franchise’s most important stars, bruising the optics of ownership yet again and putting the Jets squarely in range of the same “circus” conversation that so much of Saleh’s tenure was devoted to eroding, would not be satiated with a one-and-done playoff appearance, or in not making the playoffs at all.
At the moment, with the best version of Adams and Rodgers together, we could generously squint our eyes and call the Jets … what, exactly?
The Chiefs are clearly the best team in the AFC. The Baltimore Ravens are not far behind. The Houston Texans are a quiet-but-sturdy 5–1, having just received one of their most important players back. It would be difficult to make the argument that the Jets are better than any of these teams, even if the sunniest version of this scenario plays out.
Would winning the division for the first time since 2002 be worth it? Would only replicating the team’s magical AFC title game run under Rex Ryan satisfy them?
Or, is the goal simply to be talked about? If that’s the case, Johnson and the Jets have certainly succeeded. Successful now and whenever someone is tapped to pick up all the pieces.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Examining the Davante Adams Trade: Five Observations on Jets’ Latest Big Move.