Of Course the Aaron Rodgers Doubters Have Emerged
At age 41, it would be nearly unprecedented for Rodgers to return to anything like his previous form.
On Monday, The Athletic’s daily newsletter arrived in my inbox with this subject line, referring to Mike Sando’s always-excellent preseason QB Tiers story (in which Aaron Rodgers fell out of Tier 1 for the first time ever):
“Aaron Rodgers doubters emerge”
Well, yeah. They should emerge. Rodgers turns 41 this season, and he is coming off a ruptured Achilles tendon, a major injury that few QBs have had to come back from (much less excelled on the other side of). Both situations are relatively uncharted, and should create a lot of doubt about Rodgers’ ability to be his old self for the Jets in 2024.
The Injury
According to ESPN research that I also updated some, only a small handful of other NFL QBs suffered torn Achilles. Here’s how that went for the ones I could find:
Johnny Unitas, 1971 (age 38): Following a 1970 season in which he was not terrible, but was clearly in decline at age 37 — ending with him being knocked out of Super Bowl V with a rib injury — Unitas ruptured his right Achilles playing paddle tennis at the YMCA in April 1971. He returned in time to play Week 1, but he was ineffective all season (82 ANY/A+1) and was ultimately done being a productive QB.
Rodney Peete, 1991 (age 25): Unlike Johnny U., Peete’s injury came early in his NFL career, midway through his third season. Peete was tracking for a pretty average season leading the Detroit Lions in ‘91, and he continued to be relatively mediocre going forward. Though he started 60 more NFL games — even serving as a primary starter at times for the Lions, Eagles and Panthers — Peete never again came close to matching the 11 AV he posted in 1990, before the injury.
Dan Marino, 1993 (age 32): Marino was already regarded as one of the greatest QBs in history by the time he hit the turf with a non-contact leg injury in Week 6 of the 1993 season.
Though he missed the rest of that year, Marino came back for 1994 and perfectly matched his AV (15) from the two years before the injury. Marino’s passing efficiency did drop some upon his return, but nothing outside of what we would expect from the normal QB aging curve.
Vinny Testaverde, 1999 (age 36): This is probably the easiest comparison to make with Rodgers, right down to the situation — a Jets team hyped in preseason losing its aging QB for the season to an Achilles early in Week 1. When he came back, Testaverde wasn’t anywhere near as good as he’d been in 1998, finishing with a double-digit AV just once (10 in 2001 as the Jets went 10-6) and with an above-average ANY/A+ just once (118 in a half-season’s worth of starts in 2003 before being replaced by Chad Pennington). But it’s more than fair to wonder how much of all that would have just happened anyway, considering that Testaverde had an inconsistent pre-1998 career and was getting quite old by the 2000s.
Ty Detmer, 2000 (age 33): One of the lesser-known QB Achilles victims, Detmer was injured in the 2000 preseason against the Bears and missed the entire regular season. Detmer started 4 more NFL games (recording negative-2 AV, which probably shouldn’t be possible) before retiring, but the 1990 Heisman Trophy winner was already a journeyman backup by the time of his injury.
Kirk Cousins, 2023 (age 35): In addition to Rodgers, we don’t know how Cousins’ comeback will end up faring, either. The longtime Vikings signal-caller was having an efficient passing season (119 ANY/A+) at the time of the injury, even though Minnesota’s record had regressed to 3-4 going into his final game of the season. Now with the Falcons, Cousins and his Achilles will need to be fully healed up in order to prevent calls for No. 8 draft pick Michael Penix Jr. to replace him at QB.
Overall, only Marino came back at more or less the same level as before, though it’s very difficult to say whether that was because of the injuries or simply because they happened to a group of QBs who were generally older (and thus would probably have produced similar results whether they were hurt or not). The most we can say is that the Achilles injuries probably didn’t help.
The Age
Now, this is probably the more bearish indicator for Rodgers going forward. As I’ve pointed out before, the age curve generally comes at quarterbacks — even the great ones — pretty fast.
While Tom Brady and Drew Brees provided recent examples of aging passers continuing to perform into their 40s, the historical rule has been that QBs tend to reach their expiration date for any kind of production around the age of 40 (which Rodgers turned last December). In fact, even after the Brady/Brees era, you can count the number of viable QBs at age 41 on one hand with fingers to spare:
Brady, Brees and Warren Moon are the only 41-year-olds to ever have so much as double-digit AV in NFL/AFL history. Moreover, only Brady, Brees, Moon, Testaverde and Brett Favre even started more than 6 games at QB in any season at age 41 or older. Brady alone accounts for five of the 10 total instances where this happened in NFL/AFL history.
(Even Brees had fallen off physically by 41, eschewing passes downfield in part because of injuries. “I had a lot of limitations throughout the season as to what I could and couldn't do,” he said after the 2020 season, his last in the NFL.)
So basically, any hope that Rodgers will lead the Jets in an effective manner this season is built primarily on the premise that he is exactly like Brady: a superhuman outlier of an exception to the usual QB aging curve.
Talent-wise, that might not be wrong, and so he has more room to fall off and still be effective than a normal QB. But there seems to be an element of magical thinking to the observers who think Rodgers can pick it up right where he left off as an MVP in 2021.
(Remember, he had a down year by his standards in 2022 before leaving Green Bay, though he has a history of bouncing back from down years in the past.)
In order to do that, Rodgers would need to defy both the history of quarterbacks coming off Achilles injuries and, more importantly, the history of QBs trying to do just about anything at age 41. Even for the king of the miracle deep pass, this might be one Hail Mary too tough to pull off.
Filed under: NFL
Meaning his Adjusted Net YPA was 1.2 standard deviations below the NFL average. (PFR’s adjusted passing stats are scaled so that 100 is average and every 15 points in either direction represents 1 standard deviation.)
Thanks for highlighting this issue - which is indicative of poor thinking and sadly at epidemic levels today in sports media. I refer to this faulty logic as the cherry-picking fallacy or the fallacy of the unwarranted extrapolation. Here, someone will find a single outlier case and pretend it is predictive of future use cases simply because it happened once, while simultaneously ignoring the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Look, aberrations happen. As my college statistics professor said years ago "the laws of statistics do not merely allow for outliers, they compel them." The tails on those bell curves are real. They are not, however, particularly predictive or useful in decision-making. Yet, we hear it all the time in sports media, where mere mention of an outlier use case somehow magically makes irrelevant all the contrary data or evidence.
This fallacious thinking is easy to identify. It is usually preceded by the phrase "well, what about ________?". For example, arguing the truth that smaller quarterback height negatively correlates to NFL success is met with "well what about Drew Brees? Don't tell him that!"
The list is endless. Logically opining that the financial benefits of a rookie QB NFL contract almost demand that teams start them year one is often countered with "well what about Jordan Love holding a clipboard for three years? Worked out pretty well for the Packers, eh?" Even suggesting that passing accuracy is an important skill to quarterbacking will often elicit "unless your name is Josh Allen...right?"
Again, aberrations happen, but so what? You don't build your life or organizations around outliers. Poker players don't chase unicorns, they understand the power of knowing the odds and acting accordingly - even when their decisions don't always work out.
Poker player Annie Duke has referred to this sort of bad thinking as "resulting" where you view decisions solely based on whether they just happened to work out and not the quality of the judgment exercised when they were made. Terry Fontenot's decision to Draft Michael Pennix was a poor one, even if it happens to work out later.
One tiresome and overused source for the cherry-picking fallacy is Tom Brady. Every specious comment around Draft position, to arm strength, to poor running ability, to poor fitness at the Combine, has used Brady as justification for bad takes. Tom Brady is what is known in Latin as sui generis - unique, one of a kind, special. He, like Mahomes in other ways, is not likely to be repeated or seen again soon. Yet both are continually brought up as common examples to justify bad thinking on a particular topic.
Brady's final season unleashed one final torrent of awful cherry-picked takes on how quarterbacks can now suddenly "play well into their 40s." Yes, Tom Brady played until he was 45, but that doesn't mean that single outlier case changed the aging curve for the position. As noted, Aaron Rodgers might work out this year. His previous high level of performance could allow him to remain relatively effective even if he regresses somewhat from age. Still, he will have regressed.
I will close with one caution. Science does march forward. Looking at Achilles tendon injuries from 20 or more years ago is not likely relevant to what a player faces today with recent medical advances, much like looking at old data around Tommy John surgeries. I would suspect that looking at the larger data pool of non-quarterback NFL players with Achilles injuries will show that they fully recover at a much higher rate today than even 10 years ago. Very different procedures and expected outcomes.
Thanks as always.
This article not getting nearly enough attention particularly given it was posted in the midst of all the "Jets in the Super Bowl" mindless ridiculousness. Nailed it.