Three weeks after emerging from his Darkness Retreat in southern Oregon, Aaron Rodgers has announced that he would very much like to rent out his laser-guided howitzer arm to the New York Jets. The 39-year-old quarterback on Wednesday told the gang at The Pat McAfee Show (and a live streaming audience that peaked at 498,083 viewers) that while he went into the “hippie mountain” facility believing that there was a 90% chance he’d hang it up, something changed during his four days of solitude.
At some point while Rodgers was hunkered down in the Cascade-Siskiyou wilderness, his spirit animal—presumably a corgi with a reliable ayahuasca connection—advised him to leave Green Bay for the bright lights of Broadway/Bergen County. In revealing his intentions to the world, the four-time MVP effectively sent the NFL’s media partners scrambling to make room for the J-E-T-S in their fall schedules.
Despite playing in a relatively tiny media market, the Packers have been a huge TV draw since 1992, when Brett Favre began his storied tenure at Lambeau. Hardly a week goes by when Green Bay isn’t featured somewhere on the national dial, and that consistency has been rewarded in ratings points. Like his predecessor, Rodgers makes for must-see TV; despite a crummy 8-9 run, last season’s Pack averaged a whopping 23.2 million coast-to-coast viewers during their Sunday NFL appearances.
While the networks submitted their 2023 wish lists during the week of Super Bowl LVII—as part of an annual ritual, TV reps look to optimize their upcoming schedules by lobbying the league with a roster of their 25 most-desired matchups—Rodgers’ mercurial temperament/imperial flakiness has complicated the process for two consecutive years. Contingency now rules the day, and the lists that were structured around a Rodgers farewell tour largely have been scrapped. While the Packers are a cinch to appear in at least a half-dozen nationally televised games this fall, the Jets now feature prominently in every revised ask.
If nothing else, Rodgers in a different shade of green should translate to big TV bucks. If advertisers already had to dig deep to buy time in nationally televised Packers games—in 2022, the average unit cost for a commercial that aired during Rodgers’ 10 appearances on CBS/Fox/NBC was around $900,000 a pop—imagine what they’ll shell out to reach all those swells in New York.
The sudden mania for Gang Green should make for a radical upgrade of the team’s visibility. Although they eventually popped up in a Week 16 Amazon Prime outing against the Jags, the Jets last season did not make a single appearance in a national TV broadcast. Such has been the case since Rex Ryan packed up his dress sweats and headed for Buffalo; in the last 10 years, the Jets have played in exactly one national Sunday broadcast on one of the Big Three networks.
Sometimes the enthusiasm is merited. When Tom Brady shipped off for Tampa in 2020, the Bucs became an overnight media darling, appearing in eight national TV windows. That was up from three the previous year—and each of those dates were low-rated curiosities hosted by the NFL Network. With the GOAT under center, the Bucs that season averaged 22 million broadcast viewers, more than quadruple what the team managed during the previous year’s Witness Protection Program stint of three Thursday Night Football telecasts (5.01 million).
If the prospect of Rodgers bringing his bag of tricks to the land of 7.45 million TV households has network execs tenting their fingers and guffawing like so many over-caffeinated cartoon villains, a transplant is not necessarily a guarantee of runaway success. Russell Wilson serves as a cautionary tale; in the wake of his trade from Seattle, Denver in 2022 was slated to play in six national windows, thereby doubling down on its year-ago exposure. The Russ-enhanced Broncos averaged 16.4 million viewers, down about 100,000 impressions versus the previous season.
Oops.
Among the upcoming Jets matchups that are now much in demand are an away game against Dallas, a MetLife Stadium showdown against their Big Blue co-tenants and a clutch of home outings (Bills, Eagles, Chiefs, Dolphins). Of course, the deal has to go through before anyone officially goes all-in on the Jets. Rodgers is certain that the Packers would prefer to move on without him, and as he told McAfee, his intention is to suit up for New York. Still, some financial cat-herding will have to be sorted out before Rodgers tries to pluck Joe Namath’s No. 12 from the rafters. “I haven’t been holding anything up at this point,” Rodgers said. “It’s been compensation that the Packers are trying to get for me, kind of digging their heels in.”
Assuming the pieces all fall together and Rodgers lands safely in Gotham, the local affiliates can expect to revel in a significant upturn in ratings impressions. There’s nowhere to go but up. The Jets in 2022 were the lowest-performing NFL franchise for the third straight year, posting a 7.0 household rating in the home market. By comparison, the only team that actually plays within the bounds of the Empire State out-delivered the Jets by 540%, as the Bills averaged a 44.8 rating in Buffalo.
Ratings measure the percentage of homes tuning in to a telecast within a given market, so there’s a disconnect between those decimal-bearing estimates and the actual number of households in play. While the Jets and Giants (9.2 rating) in the past have had far stronger showings in their home market, the sheer size of their shared base gives both teams a significant advantage over even the highest-rated teams from smaller markets. For example, the Jets averaged around 987,893 homes per game in the New York DMA, while the Bills’ local telecasts last season averaged 400,278 households. So as much as Josh Allen & Co. command a far greater share of their home market—per Nielsen, 77% of all Buffalo-area TVs in use were locked in on the Bills last season, versus 22% for the Jets in NYC—the relative size of each audience is a function of the sheer number of TV homes in each DMA.
A similar dynamic holds sway in the split Los Angeles market, where the Rams (8.5) and Chargers (7.7) vie each week for the attention of some 5.74 million TV households. The Rams may be the third lowest-rated local franchise, but each week some 907,023 area homes tuned in to their games on KNBC, KCBS and FOX-11. That’s good for eighth place on the list. The Giants in 2022 were the fifth lowest-rated local club, but were second only to the Cowboys in terms of their overall deliveries (1.37 million homes).
Whichever metric you choose to deploy, Rodgers’ jump to the Jets is going to set off a media frenzy in an already over-stimulated burgh. If Rodgers can recapture that pre-2022 magic (and he wasn’t nearly as underwhelming as last season’s stat line suggests), he’s going to put up big numbers on both the national and local sides of the Nielsen ledger. Perhaps he’s not going to be able to pull off the heist that Brady engineered after fleeing New England, but we’re talking about a Jets team that hasn’t had a God-tier QB under center since Joe Willie shocked the world in 1968-69.
And no, Brett Favre’s 16-game stint with Gang Green doesn’t count. Favre, who was also 39 when he left Green Bay, played Chad Pennington-level ball in 2008. (Largely because of a torn biceps that reduced his throwing arm to a soggy lasagna noodle, but still.) That said, Favre’s disappointing season in New York should give us a sense of what we might expect when Rodgers touches down at JFK. A month before Favre took his first official snap as a Jet, his No. 4 shattered the NFL’s single-day record for jersey sales. Some 10,000 fans showed up to watch his first practice. Once the season got underway, ratings (and ad revenue) soared.
McAfee told Rodgers that New York will throw a parade for him, although that’s an understatement. If the old fella actually brings the Jets to the promised land, they’ll probably erect a statue of him in Central Park. But it’s also possible that Rodgers didn’t chew over one rather significant factor while he was taking his tenebrous timeout. The tabloids are a nightmare, sports radio is an open-air madhouse and even the local TV guys are as stabby as the Roman Senate on the Ides of March. If he isn’t just about perfect, the thin-skinned QB is in for 1,000 miles of bad road.
“I still have that fire,” Rodgers said Wednesday. “I want to play and I would like to play in New York, it’s just a matter of getting that done at this point.”
New York will roll out the welcome mat; how things proceed from there is up to Rodgers and his ancestral medicine. In any event, the NFL’s media partners are about to make out like bandits.
