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Like him or not, Aaron Rodgers is his own man, and doesn’t live his life by public opinion polls.
“I’m not controlled,” Rodgers said on the icanflypod. “Nobody controls my messaging. Nobody controls my social media. Nobody can control me. You know, I think for myself. I speak for myself. And that’s dangerous to an establishment that wants more power, control and obedience.”
Let’s not get into politics here. That isn’t why people sign up for on a sports site.
But let’s use that quote and connect it to One Jets Drive.
Rodgers needs to have that attitude to help fix the Jets’ culture, and of all the people in that building, he’s the one who can spearhead this effort best.
It’s likely not going to be from entrenched people who have been there a long time. They are good people, but some can’t see the forest for the trees, because they settled into a different modus operandi.
It’s Rodgers who needs to lead this team out of the wilderness. They have missed the playoffs 13 years in a row, a current high in all professional sports.
So Rodgers needs to keep hammering home the points that can help fix the culture. Dianna Russini, did the Jets a favor, in a way, with her story in The Athletic with 30 sources, not portraying the Jets’ culture in the best light.
When she got ripped by fans for the story she fired back, “They (fans) want to call people liars because they don’t want to believe that it’s that bad, that the culture is that awful. So don’t blame the team, blame the reports that uncovered all of this.”
Fair point. Don’t kill the messenger. Fix the problem.
And it’s Rodgers who can do it. He needs to take his mantra of “I’m not controlled. Nobody controls my messaging” to work at the Jets Atlantic Health Training Complex, and continue saying things like, “Anything in this building that we’re doing that has nothing to do with winning needs to be assessed,” Rodgers said after the season. “Everything that we do has to have a purpose … the bullshit that has nothing to do with winning has to get out of the building.”
And he needs to have a long talk with the owner and lay out the tenets necessary to fix the culture.
He needs to tell people to stop with the moral victories, praising people on social media for their plays in games the team lost.
That is bad for the culture.
Just like a lack of accountability. You can’t say after a player made a series of bonehead moves in three straight games, “If you knew him, you wouldn’t have a problem with anything he did.”
When it comes to culture, the four-time NFL MVP, who has a 148-75-1 record as a starter, needs to be an uncontrollable loose cannon within the confines of One Jets Drive about the culture.
“If you want to be a winning organization, you have to put yourself in the position to win championships and be competitive, everything that you do matters,” Rodgers said in December.
He needs to lead the way on the cultural front.
April 12, 2024
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