Aaron Rodgers won’t play for the New York Jets during the 2025 season.
However, it sounds like he intends to play football for someone else citing “unfinished business.”
NFL Insider Albert Breer of Sports Illustrated revealed that Rodgers told head coach Aaron Glenn and general manager Darren Mougey, “that it was his tentative intention to play in 2025. These things can change, of course, but Rodgers gave the Jets the impression that he had unfinished business to take care of.”
“So going forward that is the next piece of the puzzle, is Rodgers going to play in 2025? I think he is. That is just my informed opinion on this,” Breer said on “The Breer Report.”
Breer explained that there are teams in the NFL that would be a fit for Rodgers in 2025. He mentioned two that make sense: the New York Giants and the Pittsburgh Steelers.
A Difference in Paths Forward for the Jets and Rodgers
Rodgers still wants to play and the Jets need a starting quarterback, so what gives?
Breer described it as an “it’s not you, it’s me” explanation.
“The reality was that the Jets’ desire to move on was about them and not Rodgers, and timelines that don’t match up. New York, under its leaders, was looking at a deliberate reimagination of its football operation, which was going to be tough to marry up with a quarterback playing for this year alone,” Breer said. “For what it’s worth, the Jets do believe Rodgers still has bullets left in the gun.”
When Rodgers first arrived via blockbuster trade in 2023 he talked about the lonely Super Bowl III trophy in the Jets facilities. Breer said every team’s goal is winning the whole thing every year, “But in realistic terms, the pursuit of it doesn’t look the same for everyone.”
In other words, Rodgers is playing his career year-to-year in hopes of winning another championship. While the Jets aren’t realistically in the title picture anymore and this “boils down to goals that don’t really match up,” Breer added.
It comes down to what would the Jets’ ceiling have been with Rodgers at quarterback in 2025. Super Bowl? Playoffs? Winning record? More of the same? What Rodgers and the Jets thought the answer to that question was didn’t align.
Jets Must Sort Through the Rubble to Move Forward
Ultimately the Rodgers-Jets trade will be remembered as a failed experiment.
ESPN’s Rich Cimini revealed that it is “likely” the Jets cut Rodgers with a post-June 1 designation.
That means the team will carry him on the roster up until the new league year on March 12. They will then cut him “which will allow them to split the remaining cap charges ($49 million) over two years: $14 million in 2025, $35 million in 2026.”
By splitting it across two years, the team creates cap flexibility that wouldn’t exist if they took the entire $49 million dead cap hit on the chin in 2025.
“In this scenario, his current cap number ($23.5 million) will be on their books until June 2 and then drops to $14 million — a savings of $9.5 million for 2025. He would be free to sign elsewhere [on] March 13. He doesn’t have to wait until then to speak with teams; he can do so immediately,” Cimini explained.
