Should the Jets be concerned about giving up a 2024 first-round pick for Aaron Rodgers? | You Pod to Win the Game
Yahoo Sports' Charles McDonald and Charles Robinson discuss the ongoing saga between Aaron Rodgers and the Packers, including why the Jets should be worried about giving up their future for the star QB.
Video Transcript
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CHARLES ROBINSON: What if Aaron Rodgers plays in 2023 and, in the 15th game of the season, he tears his Achilles, right? Or he breaks his collarbone at the beginning of the year or whatever, and it destroys basically their ability to have either a playoff run? Or God forbid, if it happens at the beginning of the season, what's that 2024 draft pick going to look like if he blows out an ACL in game 1?
Now you don't have Aaron Rodgers, right? And you're rolling with, for all intents and purposes, Zach Wilson for the balance of 2023. And now you've given Green Bay a hard first-round pick with no qualifiers on it. It's just a straight first-round pick. Well, all of a sudden, Green Bay is potentially sitting there and, if this is bad enough, staring at-- I don't know-- maybe a top-10 pick. I mean, I wouldn't think the Jets would be that bad, but who knows? Possible.
And what do you and I know about the 2024 draft? There's some stud-ass quarterbacks at the top of the 2024 draft. So that to me, right now, from what I understand from talking to somebody at the Packers, that's kind of the hold up. Even though Brian Gutekunst came out and said, we don't necessarily need a first-round pick, what he was referring to was the 13th overall pick in this year's draft.
I do think they want a first-round pick. They just, if they have to, are willing to push that to 2024. But they don't want anything tied to it. That's kind of what's going on right now and has these two sides deadlocked.
CHARLES MCDONALD: This trade is really interesting to me from the standpoint of I understand the argument on both sides. Looking from the Packers' standpoint, Aaron Rodgers didn't have his best season last year, but he did win the MVP back-to-back years. It'd be nice to be able to say that you got a first-round pick back in return for Aaron Rodgers and someone who's been playing at an MVP level very recently.
On the Jets' side, there's definitely a scenario where Aaron Rodgers even plays this year and then retires after the season. And it'd be smart to kind of protect yourself from that scenario too. Because let's say Aaron Rodgers plays this year, and you get to the wildcard or the divisional round, but you end up losing and he retires. You still need a quarterback. It's kind of tough to see where each side would be wrong in the negotiations because I think they both kind of make sense in how they're approaching it.
And I just want this to be over. I kind of wonder if you're Joe Douglas, after a while, are you just saying, hey, just push all the chips in here? Because what happens if they miss the playoffs regardless? Is he on the hot seat for that? I don't know. Maybe, at some point, you just get tired and say, screw it. Let's go for it.