Aaron Rodgers has thrown 7,661 career regular-season passes.
He wishes that total was — and now admits it should be — at least one number higher.
Rodgers reported to Florham Park on Tuesday for the start of Jets training camp and his 20th NFL season, looking to put behind him the shock of suffering a torn Achilles on just the fourth snap of his Second Act.
But first, Rodgers has answered a nagging question left over from the fateful Week 1 night against the Bills: Why didn’t he throw the ball to an open Garrett Wilson before Leonard Floyd sacked him and ended his 2023 season?
“I felt like pre-snap that the safety was going to come down, so I think I played it all a little bit too quick,” Rodgers told former Post columnist Ian O’Connor in his upcoming book on the quarterback’s life, “Out of the Darkness: The Mystery of Aaron Rodgers.” “And I was thinking about getting it backside to the under [receiver]. So, I probably should have just thrown it right to Garrett.”
Split left on first down at the Jets’ 43-yard line, Wilson had run a quick in pattern toward midfield and had a clear step or two on his man.
It appeared that Rodgers was supposed to take a three-step drop, plant and fire the ball to Wilson.
Jets head coach Robert Saleh later said the actual sequence “extended further than the timing of the play” that was called.
“Garrett really flattened off his route, and I thought if he goes vertical at all…because I thought [Micah Hyde] was going to crash down on that,” Rodgers said in the book. “So, I kinda looked left, and I was going to come back and throw the under to the right. I almost threw it to [Allen Lazard].”
Almost.
Rodgers instead tried and failed to spin away from the oncoming Floyd, who had beaten a cut-block attempt by 38-year-old left tackle Duane Brown.
A cut block requires the offensive lineman to lunge at a defender’s legs in order to get his hands down and his body lower to the ground to clear air space for the quarterback’s quick pass. But Brown had shoulder surgery during the previous offseason and practiced very little over the summer.
“We never really cut block, especially nowadays,” one Super Bowl-winning offensive line coach told the author. “As athletic as these guys are, they just jump over the cut. …You can’t afford to lose your franchise guy that way.
“I’ve got a lot of respect for Duane Brown, but Leonard Floyd is not a guy I would cut block. He’s too good of an athlete. He will just jump over you.”
Asked if he was generally opposed to that blocking technique, as reported, Rodgers cited his Green Bay Packers left tackle and close friend.
“I didn’t like David Bakhtiari doing cut blocks,” he told the author, “because he was terrible at it.”
But was it a good idea for Jets offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett and offensive line coach Keith Carter to ask Brown to cut block a younger, more athletic defender with a history of sacking Rodgers?
“I should have thrown it to Garrett,” the quarterback responded. “That’s how I look at it.”
Former Jets quarterback and current WFAN host Boomer Esiason said in the book that Rodgers never should have held the ball and taken the sack.
“I know it’s not on the offensive line that he got hurt,” Esiason said.
O’Connor reported that Rodgers’ friend, fitness entrepreneur and podcaster Aubrey Marcus drove him that night from MetLife Stadium to his New Jersey home on the Montclair/Cedar Grove border.
Punter Thomas Morstead called Rodgers after midnight following the Jets’ dramatic overtime victory and the two cried together on the phone. For inspiration, Morstead sent his teammate a 2013 Kobe Bryant post that went viral after the Lakers superstar tore his Achilles.
“People think he’s got everything,” the punter said of Rodgers. “He’s got all the money, he’s had a great career, all these different things. But he loves playing ball. It’s pure, you know what I mean? He’s not thinking about lost marketing opportunities. He was excited to play with this team and try to do something special this year, and now it’s not going to happen for him.”
Unless it happens for Rodgers and the Jets in 2024.