Football the top priority for Rodgers as Jets' Super Bowl window closing fast

FLORHAM PARK, N.J. - One of the National Football League’s top off-season dramas came to an end Wednesday when New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers met the media after the first practice of training camp, answering the questions that had burned-up eons of talk radio and barstool conversations for months.

His trip to Egypt that forced him to miss June’s mandatory minicamp workouts was a bucket-list item he had booked based on the previous year’s off-season calendar.

And by the time he realized his adventure was going to create conflict, it was too late to do anything about it.

And what an adventure it was, riding camels in the desert, something he’d dreamed about for three decades since becoming fascinated by Egyptian and Greek history as a child in a gifted schooling program.

Yes, he mentioned the gifted part.

And with that, the page was turned to football and matters that might actually affect how many games the Jets win this season.

About an hour-and-a-half before Rodgers took the podium, head coach Robert Saleh told the gathered media there was an emphasis this season on living in the moment, being where your feet are and focussing on being the best team the Jets can be each and every day.

He said he could feel the diminished hype and expectations and said his players seemed more “businesslike”

No mention of Super Bowl or numbers of wins or such.

It was a line of thinking reflected in the comments of several prominent Jets players who’d spoken Tuesday and Wednesday. 

That is until Rodgers got the podium and stated matter-of-factly that the goal is to get to New Orleans, which of course is the site of this February’s Super Bowl.

Then he handicapped the number of Super Bowl contenders at 8-12 and chimed-in with “we’re one of them.”

Rodgers was merely releasing the elephant in the room, because this whole experiment is about trying to mesh a lighting-in-a-bottle quarterback whose time is running out with an elite defence to win a Super Bowl, something the Jets haven’t done since Joe Namath in Super Bowl III.

But if there was urgency about that happening soon a year ago, there’s even more so today.

While the Super Bowl goal sounds outlandish for a team that owns the NFL’s longest consecutive playoff drought, it’s actually not at all crazy.

The Jets have been one of the NFL’s consistently best defences under Saleh, and they’ve added to it with double-digit sackmaster Haason Reddick in a trade with the Philadelphia Eagles. (Reddick is in a training camp hold-out over a contract issue but that’s a story for another day.)

They are strong up-front, elite at linebacker and they have what might be the NFL’s best secondary led by third-year pro corner Sauce Gardner.

On the other side of the ball, a wonky offensive line from a year ago has been upgraded with two veteran tackles, including longtime Dallas Cowboy Tyron Smith to protect Rodger’s blind side.

And he has an incredibly enticing target in third-year pro Garrett Wilson, the Ohio State product who has managed back-to-back 1,000 yard seasons to begin his career, despite there being two seasons of horrific play at quarterback.

Rodgers went out of his way from the podium to single Wilson out for greatness, saying his former Packer teammate Davante Adams has been the NFL’s best receiver the past five or six seasons, but that Wilson had the skills to take the mantle away.

More significant than him saying that to the media is that he told it to Wilson as well, which tantalizes the imagination of what it might look like if Rodgers is right about his assessment. He talked about Wilson as if he was his pupil, someone he was imparting with his wisdom from two decades in the league.

Curiously, Rodger’s availability ended without him being asked about his recent comment at a golf tournament that he was looking forward to playing with Adams again.

That will have to wait for another day.

But the significance of Wednesday was how Rodgers managed to erase all the concern and conjecture over whether football remains his greatest priority amid so many other interests and distractions away from the game.

Put bluntly, there was absolutely no sense at all that Rodgers is anything less than who he’s always been.

And for the New York Jets, that’s a very good thing.