Is Aaron Rodgers The Jets' Golden Super Bowl Ticket?
He might be. But don't bet on it.
With the unsurprising news officially breaking Wednesday that, yes, Aaron Rodgers wants to be a member of the New York Jets, it got me thinking about what it will take for Rodgers to really deliver on the Super Bowl hype that surely follows him to New York.
Currently, the Jets are +1500 to win the Super Bowl next season, per FanDuel Sportsbook. That’s tied for sixth-best in the NFL, and it gives New York a 5% implied probability after removing the juice. For a franchise like the Jets, who haven’t won a Super Bowl since the 1968 season, that’s a chance they’ll gladly take.
But what does that 5% chance look like? I reached back into the archives to find this story I wrote about Andy Dalton and the Cincinnati Bengals, in which I created a simple model to estimate a team’s Super Bowl odds based on just two factors: The performance of its quarterback (as measured by Pro-Football-Reference’s adjusted net YPA index) and the performance of its defense (as measured by PFR’s simple rating system).
Have a perfectly average (100 index) QB and an average (0.0 SRS) defense? Congrats, you have less than a 1% chance to win it all. Have an elite QB instead (but the same defense)? Your odds climb to about 6%. Have an average QB and an elite defense? Your odds are about 5%.
We can play around with all of those combinations endlessly, but the most interesting ones are those that are pertinent to Rodgers and the Jets. Let’s start with each component performance from last year: Rodgers had a QB index of 99 (so actually a hair below average) and the Jets’ DSRS was a league-best +4.8. Plug those numbers into the equation, and you’d expect that QB/defense combo to have a 4.0% chance to win the Super Bowl, which is actually a little worse than the betting markets are expecting.
Perhaps they’re baking in the fact that Rodgers had a down season last year. Plug in his league-leading 123 QB index from 2021, and watch those Jets odds rise to about 18%. But of course, it’s a two-way street — the Jets had a -6.7 DSRS in 2021, which actually ranked last in the NFL. You can’t really win a Super Bowl that way, I’m sorry to say.
In reality, both numbers will most likely be somewhere in the middle in 2023. If Rodgers is merely a bit above average (105 QB index) and the Jets’ defense regresses some, as defenses are inclined to do (let’s say to +4.0, about a point per game back down towards average), the Jets’ Super Bowl chances would be 4.4%. Think that’s too much or too little regression? Here’s a chart with a bunch of different combos that I think probably represent the range of realistic-to-best-case possibilities for the Jets next season:
So if Rodgers plays to his career-high 147 QB index from 2011 and the Jets maintain a +5.0 defense, New York would indeed have an unstoppable steamroller of a team on its hands. But more practically, we have to consider that Rodgers is 39 and coming off a below-average season, and the Jets’ defense is likely to regress next year after making such a dramatic improvement last season (sorry, Sauce Gardner). Given both of those things, adding an aging Rodgers certainly improves the Jets — but it doesn’t vault them anywhere near the top of the contenders list.
Filed under: NFL