There's only one way forward for Aaron Rodgers and the Packers
Also: this really is it for Daniel Jones and the Giants
“It’s not a lie if you believe it.” That ol’ chestnut drives a lot of very dangerous thinking these days. But beyond the political implications of the sentence, it does get at a more universal truth: once you send a jolt of cosmic energy into a lie, a belief, a budding suspicion, a sense of distrust, etc. it takes on a life of its own.
Aaron Rodgers and the Packers have reached a point where their two separate versions of reality cannot coexist. The quarterback holds a grudge against an organization that, in his mind, has done him wrong over and over again. The Packers, meanwhile, are trying to manage a player who fills their shared space with negative energy, enough to threaten the overall being of the team as an entity, but also walks a fine line to hold onto a special talent that elevates the team into a contender.
Rodgers wanting out of Green Bay is the least surprising BIG NFL story. It’s been building to this for a long time. The split goes back to Rodgers and McCarthy being in the same place on the same team tasked with the same goal. We got an up close and personal look at that dynamic with Tyler Dunne’s feature story back in the spring of 2019. And while it’s more than fair to point to McCarthy’s inadequacy as a coach, you can see a deeply flawed Rodgers at work poisoning the well alongside his nemesis with the whistle.
I’d like to think that two grown men, working at the highest levels of their chosen professions, could find a way to work together. But they couldn’t. Some humans can’t, and won’t, work to best their faults. Ego, man.
It’s notable too that firing Mike McCarthy didn’t fix the problem. Aaron Rodgers has been just as unhappy, whether that’s over the front office’s free agent decisions, his new coach’s play calling (and the field goal against the Bucs last year was incredibly dumb), contract talks, and drafting Jordan Love.
More than just an evolving bad relationship, there’s Rodgers’ tendency to lash out then wave off his comments. It’s put him at odds with more than one reporter and outlet, ending with him giving them the “fake news” treatment when the khakied scribes were just doing their job. But as annoying as that is for the media, it’s got to cause lasting damage to his relationship with the team. Nobody really likes to be gaslighted.
Remember too that Rodgers is a guy whose ability to hold a grudge is truly elite (also, what a terrible way to go through life). I mean, it’s just a tweet, but still …
There’s speculation this morning from PFT about Rodgers laying the groundwork to mend the fence with the Packers, after both James Jones and John Kuhn, both former teammates, made public comments talking about a reconciliation between player and team. Maybe that’s the case. But someone here, one or both of these two sides, need to see that there’s no going back.
Throwing a handful of dirt over the hatchet won’t restring the divergent realities of Rodgers and Packers. The frustrations will resurface, probably before the end of the season, and we’ll be right be back here.
The Packers drafted Jordan Love to groom as their new starter. It’s time to make that shift. And maybe Love doesn’t work out as a pro; that’s a chance franchises have to take with young signal callers. But they can’t keep doing this dance with Rodgers—it always ends up in the same place, with a publicly disgruntled superstar who believes he has been wronged and team tiptoeing along a knife’s edge to maintain an unhealthy status quo.
Whether the Packers are ready for it or not, Aaron Rodgers’ time in Green Bay has come to an end.
If Daniel Jones doesn’t improve in 2021, that’s it
Giants general manager Dave Gettleman drafted Daniel Jones in 2019. He’s spent the two following offseasons trying to justify it.
Jones was flawed but occasionally electric as a rookie — he had just an 87.7 passer rating but also three games in which he threw four touchdown passes in 12 starts. He regressed mightily as a sophomore, ranking among the league’s bottom 10 starting quarterbacks in metrics like adjusted yards per pass, touchdown rate, and passing yards per game. He was the only player among that group of 34 qualified QBs to go the entire season without leading a single game-winning drive.
The team has put in work to fix this. New York spent three of its first five 2020 draft picks on offensive linemen to help protect a player who’d been sacked on 7.5 percent of his dropbacks and led the league in fumbles. This backfired mightily; Jones’ sack rate rose to 9.1 percent as he remained the NFL’s fumble king.
2021 has seen the club move in a different direction while revolving around its volatile young passer. Pro Bowl wideout Kenny Golladay signed a $72 million contract to replace Golden Tate on the roster. Kyle Rudolph cost another $12m to help ensure this offense from Evan Engram’s oft-inexplicable drops. But that’s not all!
With his top target with the 11th pick, DeVonta Smith, off the board, Gettleman did something he’d never done before in order to stock the cupboard for Jones’ future. He traded back in the first round and *still* managed to pick up a blue-chip wideout talent in Florida playmaker Kadarius Toney. Free agent pickup Devontae Booker and sixth-round flier Gary Brightwell have also arrived as insurance for Saquon Barkley and potential safety valves for the Giants passing game.
New York’s defense has ranked 28th and 19th in DVOA the past two seasons, but the bulk of Gettleman’s roster building in that span — first-round picks, free agency spending — has been to punch up an offense that hasn’t cracked the top 20 with Jones behind the wheel. Now the Giants, five years removed from their last winning record and nearly a full decade from their last playoff win, are at a breaking point. If Daniel Jones can’t be a viable starting quarterback even after two years of dedicated improvements, he’s likely done in New York.
And that applies to Gettleman and the rest of the Giants’ brain trust, too.
Can Jones be as good as the Giants need?
The good news is other NFL quarterbacks have made significant leaps in their third years in the league. Josh Allen went from “interesting but flawed” to “legitimate MVP candidate” thanks to his development with the Bills. Jared Goff’s third year saw him at the helm of an NFC champion. In Tom Brady’s third season, he cemented his status as the Patriots’ franchise cornerstone by leading the league in touchdown passes (with 28. The early-2000s were a different time. JNCOs. Butterfly back tattoos. Run-first offenses and suffocating defensive backs. Pour one out).
But neither Allen, Goff, nor Brady had to overcome the kind of regression that plagued Jones’ 2020. A similar example would be the rise, fall, and renaissance of Baker Mayfield in Cleveland. That would be a best-case scenario for New York, but Mayfield was aided by a brand-new coaching regime tailored to pushing him to his potential behind former Vikings QB whisperer Kevin Stefanski and his array of light lifting and designed roll-outs.
Jones won’t have that benefit. He’s still stuck with former Patriots special teams coach Joe Judge as his HC — the same guy who oversaw his gross 2020. His offensive coordinator is still Jason Garrett, which feels like a punchline unto itself. Gettleman and company are betting hard that their quarterback failures were a personnel problem and not a chain of command issue. If that bet doesn’t pay out, there are going to be a lot of uncomfortable meetings in Florham Park come Black Monday.
In terms of raw talent, there’s plenty of tools Jones can use to chisel away at his bad habits and unlock the star trapped in the giant block of Velveeta cheese we saw in 2020. The Giants’ theoretical depth chart looks like this:
WRs: Kenny Golladay, Sterling Shepard, Darius Slayton, Kadarius Toney, John Ross, Dante Pettis
RBs: Saquon Barkley, Devonta Booker, Gary Brightwell
TEs: Evan Engram, Kyle Rudolph, Levine Toilolo
That’s a pretty reasonable group! But if Jones is going to change, it’ll depend on the contributions of the new arrivals — and one big return — for 2021. Let’s break that down by man:
Kenny Golladay
Golladay, standing 6’5 with 4.5-flat 40 speed, had been utilized as Matthew Stafford’s top playmaking threat the past three years. His average target depth rose from 12.4 yards to 14.6 in 2019’s Pro Bowl season and stayed there in his five games last fall — a mark in the range of noted deep threats like Nelson Agholor, DeSean Jackson, and DJ Chark. His 62.5 percent catch rate was better than any of those guys, underscoring his value as a big, playmaking threat capable of elevating his quarterback’s play.
This is something that could help spark a turnaround for Jones, whose average pass distance went down from eight yards in 2019 to 7.1 last season. After attempting 52 deep balls in 12 starts as a rookie, he tried only 39 such throws in 14 games in 2020. Most of his team’s downfield lifting was left to Darius Slayton, who rewarded that confidence — he was the only player on the team to average more than 9.4 yards per target — with six drops (five more than ANY other Giant wideout) and a catch rate that dipped from 57.1 percent to 52.1.
Golladay’s arrival means fewer targets for Slayton. It also means fewer double teams on his side of the ball, as only Sterling Shepard served as a potential distraction in last year’s disastrous receiving corps. He’ll fall into a more complementary role, especially if John Ross — in town on a one-year, $2.25m flier of a deal — can provide anything as a field-stretching straight-line burner. Ross averaged 18.1 yards per catch in his quasi-breakout 2019.
More importantly, he’s capable of standing as the WR1 Jones has lacked his first two years in the league. And that’s a big deal for Gettleman’s first-round pick … another guy who thrived when opposing defenses had to worry about the elite talent on the other side of the lineup.
Kadarius Toney
Toney had 50 catches for 606 yards and two touchdowns his first three seasons at Florida. He had 70 for 984 yards and 10 scores in 11 games against solely Power 5 competition in 2020.
Part of this can be attributed to his past as a three-star high school quarterback who didn’t have a full-time role in the UF offense. Another big piece came from Kyle Pitts’ glow-up from useful starter to All-American/future top-four draft pick. This lack of a track record carries risk, but Golladay’s presence helps mitigate that. Toney’s career-best 83.3 percent catch rate — up from 71 percent in 2018, his last full season — also suggests his abrupt rise was the result of more than just being the Gators’ top non-Pitts option.
Like Golladay and Ross, he’s easily deployed as a safety-roasting deep threat. Unlike Golladay, whose viability downfield is a function of his length and separation skills with the ball in the air, Toney’s comes from his combination of elite speed and twitchiness. For a guy who hasn’t been a wideout relatively long, he does a nice job slicing through his breaks and leaving defensive backs to pick up the pieces in his wake:
Toney was great in 2020 in creating leverage and running at defender’s weak points. The question is whether that will hold up against NFL veterans who won’t be so easily fooled — and who have more fluid hips to make up ground than most of the defensive backs he saw in the SEC last season. With his special teams play (11.3 yards per punt return) and ability to work out of the backfield (66 carries for 580 yards in his four year Gator career), he’s got a little Percy Harvin in him.
That’s good … and bad! Harvin was occasionally great his first three seasons in the league before injuries and lack of a true position ultimately made his career more of a “what if” than an outright success. Toney is roughly the same size and will have to deal with similar punishment in the NFL.
Toney has the speed and athleticism to serve as a starter even if his ability to find holes shrinks against NFL defenses. His first assignment in New York will be to soak up the slot reps vacated by Golden Tate’s departure. He won’t have to be just a slot wideout, which will give Garrett plenty of opportunities to move him around the formation and find a mismatch.
He’s the kind of weapon his team can point to a spot and then say “go there” and it’ll work. That means he could be Garrett’s next Miles Austin … or Garrett’s next Tavon Austin.
A healthy Saquon Barkley
We know what Barkley’s capable of. Gettleman absolutely lit fire to the “don’t spend a first-rounder on a running back” philosophy by selecting him second overall in 2018, then was promptly rewarded with a rookie of the year campaign.
Barkley backslid when the Giants transitioned from Eli Manning to Jones. Barkley’s target share dropped from 21.1 percent to 12.4, but his yards per target remained stable since Jones was more likely to target him on routes developing beyond the line of scrimmage rather than the lateral screens that defined latter day Manning. The question now is how he’ll return from the torn ACL that cost him 14 games of 2020.
Barkley wasn’t great when he did play last season, but it’s a very small sample size. In 1.2 games he averaged just 1.8 yards per carry. His 15-rush, six-yard performance in the season opener led to a game plan where Jones had to throw the ball 41 times for only 279 yards (with two touchdowns and a pair of interceptions).
But that game was also the backdrop to all nine of his 2020 targets, which tied for the team high with Slayton in Week 1. A stronger supporting cast of wideouts means the Giants won’t have to be as reliant on screens and wheel routes moving forward, but it remains likely New York will look to the passing game to start Barkley up if he’s adding nothing on the ground — before getting injured in Week 2 he had four carries for 28 yards, but zero targets.
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Between Golladay, Toney, and Barkley, the Giants now have viable options deep downfield and in the short range coming out of the backfield. This will create space for Shepard to find holes and Evan Engram to get open before dropping several sure first downs. New York has weapons to stretch opponents vertically and horizontally, all of which should expand Jones’ playbook and create the opportunity needed to make a Year 3 leap.
This will make it all the more disappointing if he doesn’t. Jones’ awful 2020 can be at least partially explained by a weak supporting cast, a devastating injury to his Pro Bowl tailback, and a young offensive line that failed to congeal into anything more solid than the Jell-O recipe from which it was berthed. Barring a new stretch of disasters — always possible for a Gettleman roster — Jones will no longer have anything to explain away his incompetence other than his own incompetence.
If that’s the case, it’ll be the end of the road for a front office that staked everything it had on the former Senior Bowl star. And it will be the start of Jones’ journey down a snaking road Blake Bortles and now Mitchell Trubisky have walked before him. — CD