OUT OF THE DARK, RODGERS HAS ONE LAST CHANCE TO SAVE HIS LEGACY

He can take the $59.4 million and stink out New York as Favre did — or, he can abandon his diva act, play well and lead the Jets to a Super Bowl that flips the script after his ugly Green Bay divorce

     So this is what happens when a diva retreats into darkness for days. He is struck by a laughable epiphany: Suddenly, he embraces the thrill of playing for the New York Jets, a team mired in its own championship darkness since 1969. Yeah, sure, and COVID-19 doesn’t kill people.

     Truth be told, Aaron Rodgers finally realized inside his spiritual cave — with roots in Tibetan Buddhism and the Bon religion, if you must know — that the Green Bay Packers were sick of his rampant megalomania and finally ready to move on, as president and CEO Mark Murphy confirmed last week. No amount of ayahuasca could prevent this overgrown hippie from grasping that his bluff had been called, at last.

     “When I got out of the darkness,” he said, “something changed.”

     What changed? Jordan Love, the heir apparent since he was drafted three years ago amid Rodgers’ stormy protests, was announced as Green Bay’s new starting quarterback. If he wanted to stick around, he would wear a sideline headset. To save face, he’d have to play elsewhere, and short of such a trade, he’d have to retire. He was being chased from the kingdom he ruled since the Aughts. Given his supposed mindset when he took his retreat, retirement seemed the proper path, with millions of Rodgers-fatigued sports fans roaring in joyous relief.

     “I gotta admit I went into the darkness 90 percent retiring, 10 percent playing," he told radio host Pat McAfee in an extended interview Wednesday. “That's where my mind was, my mind was ‘I’m tired of this.’ I hadn't gotten back in my workouts yet, and I thought that's what was best for me. So I went into the darkness, and I contemplated a lot of different things, but one day I spent entirely on the reality I was retired, and one I spent on the reality that I was coming back and playing.

     “And I just sat with that for hours and hours, what that looked like, what the reality is, how that all felt, and when I came out I was really interested in what the landscape was, where Green Bay was at, and I wanted to play what the options were.”

     The options: Succumb and play for the Jets — the one NFL franchise openly recruiting him, to the point of sending owner Woody Johnson, general manager Joe Douglas and head coach Robert Saleh on a Malibu sales mission — or retire and give up the $59.465 million owed him in guaranteed salary and bonus this season. Not even Free Love Aaron, not even the man who is opposed to coronavirus vaccines but will recklessly fill his head with psychedelic drugs, is crazy enough to walk away from $59.465 million.

     He has been exposed, again, as a fraud of historic proportions. The Packers challenged him to retire, and in his intense seclusion, deprived of all light, all he saw were piles of money. So he threw a pity party for himself, blamed the team bosses for failing to communicate with him and said goodbye to Cheeseheads everywhere, many of whom can’t wait to support Love and a new outlook after years of internal hate. “The Packers want to move on and have let me know in so many words,” Rodgers said. “I f—ing love that city. I love that organization and always am going to have love for that organization. The facts are, right now they want to move on, and now so do I.

     “I have nothing but love in my heart for every Packer fan and everybody who works in the organization. My life is better because of my time in Green Bay. But we’ve just got to look at the reality. They want to move on. They don’t want me to come back and that’s fine. They’re ready to move on with Jordan. That’s awesome. Jordan’s going to be a great player.”

     And so, he’ll grab the money and head to New York. There, he’ll still have a chance to somehow save a career twilight trending uglier than it has for any Hall of Fame quarterback in recent memory. My takeaway is that Rodgers is smart enough, despite his lapses in loopiness, to realize that a dozen years of frustration in Green Bay — zero Super Bowl appearances since his only title in 2011 — could be eased by a full-blown New York renaissance. Just as that city will crush him if he flops, the fans will celebrate him like a rock star if he leads the Jets to the Big Game.

     He’ll never be remembered on the plateau of Tom Brady, who has won six more Super Bowls than Rodgers. He already has been lapped, at 39, by Patrick Mahomes, who has two championships before his 28th birthday. He owns as many rings as Trent Dilfer and Brad Johnson. But if he flips the script and wins a Vince Lombardi Trophy with the Jets — while wearing Joe Namath’s No. 12, which the prognosticating legend heartily endorses — his agony will be lifted. Whether Rodgers can stay healthy, avoid turnover binges and handle the daily burden of playing in the country’s largest media and financial market, after 18 seasons in the smallest town in pro sports, remains to be seen.

     But once the Jets meet the trade demands of the Packers, who are playing negotiating hardball and toying with Rodgers a final time, this becomes the biggest story in America’s most popular and prosperous league. You don’t have to like Rodgers to realize the magnitude of his profile, which has included too many celebrity romances and now will be gossip-bombed by regular Page Six rundowns and photos every time he steps out in the city. It’s a love-or-loathe narrative, as it has been in Wisconsin since his ego ran amok, and his legacy depends on how he deals with his new, pressurized challenge.

     Brett Favre, we recall, did not handle New York well. In what has become an eerie repeat of the circumstances that led to Rodgers inheriting the Green Bay gig, Favre feuded with Packers management amid frequent retirement threats — even weeping at one such press conference — before he was traded to … the Jets. His only season there started well, with six touchdown passes in one victory, but he crashed in a flurry of interceptions, losses and injuries. He was accused of sending inappropriate messages and images by the team’s game-day host, Jenn Sterger, and he fled the Jets in shame. He signed with the Packers’ rivals, the Minnesota Vikings, and generated one last hurrah with a run to the NFC championship game. He lost and should have retired, but he stubbornly returned. His career ended with a concussion after he was sacked by a Chicago pass rusher, after which Favre said to trainer Eric Sugarman, “Suge, what are the Bears doing here?”

     At this point, retirement would have been similarly unflattering to Rodgers. He wants to give it another try for a team with an elite defense, a team that has attempted to appease him even before a trade is finalized — hiring one of his favorite coaches, deposed Denver head coach Nathaniel Hackett, to be offensive coordinator; then signing a faithful receiver, Allen Lazard. Who’s next, Odell Beckham Jr.? Davante Adams?

     “There are a lot of reasons why the Jets are attractive. There's one coach who has meant as much to me as any coach I've ever had,” said Rodgers, referring to Hackett, who helped Rodgers win back-to-back league Most Valuable Player awards in 2020-21, his third and fourth MVPs.

     If nothing else, Rodgers has avoided scandal in a relentlessly polarizing existence. So we’ll assume he won’t be sexting the game-day host. Maybe he’ll even abandon his diva tendencies. But he’d better play well. And he’d better make a playoff push that leads to the Super Bowl, unlike Favre. The Packers already have moved on. “Very few players play for only one team,” Murphy told a TV station. “Obviously, Brett had a great career. Aaron had a great career here. Regardless of what happens, Aaron will be in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He’ll be in our Hall of Fame. We’ll bring him back, retire his number. This is just one of the things that we go through as a team. We want to try to achieve something that’s good for both Aaron and us.”

     He could have finished his career in Green Bay. He stopped wanting that ending, sensing an inevitable divorce as Brady did in New England. Whether Rodgers embraces the reality of his new ending, in a city that never sleeps and never weeps for aging losers, won’t be helped by another darkness retreat. The lights are too bright in Times Square.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.