Reacting to a hotly anticipated event evening
At the start of the offseason, reporters told us that Rodgers and Wilson were the two main dominoes that had to fall first. All the others would follow.
They have fallen, the whole league rumbled. Let’s ponder what this all means.
Rodgers stayed with the Packers. He’s not a rip-off, it’s a matter of respect
Wisconsin’s Aaron Rodgers maneuvered and maneuvered and didn’t maneuver, settling for impressive lavs – $200 million over four years, at $50 million a year on average. Now, not Mahomes, but the four-time MVP is the highest-paid quarterback in the league.
“Chose the money over the nut,” is the most common reaction. But that’s a very simplistic assessment.
First of all, he wasn’t guaranteed any “nut” in Denver. Rodgers is being held up as an example of Brady, but Tampa was a team that had everything but a quarterback, plus Tom had top free agents reaching for pennies on the dollar. I’m not ready to say the Broncos are in as much contentment, plus Rodgers doesn’t have the plume of the greatest player in NFL history. More importantly, the AFC West winning is not the same as the NFC South. Right now, in the entire conference, Rodgers is the last top dude. There are as many top quarterbacks in the AFC West alone as there are in the entire NFC.
Second, Rodgers got what he has long asked for in a passive-aggressive manner. His opinion is being reckoned with, he’s been given leverage in the clubhouse. They brought the quarterbacks coach back from retirement at his request, they are willing to bring back/retain receivers at his request (see Randall Cobb and Davante Adams). For the first time in a long time, Aaron has a normal relationship with the head coach, general manager and president.
From this comes the money factor. Fans often wonder: well, what do they need so much money for? They already have enough for two lifetimes! For top athletes (those who do not have a business streak, that’s important), money does indeed cease to have material value fairly quickly. But it still speaks to the influence and status factor within the hangout. Rodgers wanted to feel that he mattered to the club — he got that proof.
He wasn’t guaranteed a championship ring anywhere. Only money and a legacy at the club where he had spent his entire career were guaranteed.
It’s not Wilson who is starting from scratch. It’s Seattle starting from scratch.
It’s clear that Wilson is getting a team that is theoretically in better shape than the current Seattle team. True, they will have to prove their worth in duels in absentia with Mahomes, Herbert and Carr, but the transition from the NFC West to the AFC West is not as drastic in terms of increasing the level of sophistication as it is from the NFC North. The other question is, if it doesn’t work out right away, who will Denver strengthen with and how will it strengthen in future seasons?
Still, there is a sense that clubs played a key role here. Denver got tired of fudging the draft and scrounging around on the free agent market and decided to adopt Les Snead’s “fuck the picks” principle. Wilson may not be Rodgers in terms of level of play, but he’s younger.
Seattle, on the other hand, never fully believed Russell Wilson was capable of winning another ring on his own. In the Super Bowl years, the quarterback was an addition to a powerful team, but after getting a big contract, the process of building a balanced team broke down. Pete Carroll himself indirectly confirmed this, saying that the team used to play all the defense it wanted, but now there is none.
Carroll was helped by Seattle’s lack of a hard-nosed central authority. There isn’t a strong owner here like most other clubs, so the head coach’s opinion weighs a lot more. And since Carroll isn’t ready to leave, that means he’s morally ready to reboot the whole project. With all that wealth, why not reboot, right? Especially while there are such powerful competitors in the division.
Wilson had an extremely limited list of teams he was willing to leave Seattle for. But it just so happened that Denver was on that list. And if you’re pushed out of one place and welcomed with arms in another, what else were you supposed to do?
