Jets are already linked to Aaron Rodgers’ replacement, and Cowboys fans won’t like it

So far in Aaron Rodgers’ illustrious New York Jets career, he has played part of one regular-season game for Gang Green, suffered a major lower-body injury and has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. Nobody knows when an Achilles is going to pop, but I would have really liked to have seen Rodgers show up to Jets mandatory minicamp. This team hasn’t made the AFC playoffs since 2010.

With how last year went for him, and what could be coming down the pipeline if he is a totally washed 40-year-old man, we have to ask ourselves this: What if this is it for The Discount Double Check? Rodgers is still under contract with the Jets for this year and next, but you have to wonder if the milk expires this year, or expired last year. What if the Jets actually decided to move on from him in 2025?

Lou Scataglia of NFL Spin Zone proposed that if the Jets were to go in that direction, their top target should be Dallas Cowboys starter Dak Prescott. While I agree with Evan Massey of Jets Country that I wouldn’t move off Rodgers until 2026 at the earliest, Prescott to the Jets would certainly move the needle. I don’t know if Prescott makes the Jets all that much better, but he does have age on his side.

Let’s discuss what would need to happen for this extreme replacement proposal to become a reality.

The dollars and cents have to make sense first, so that is going to be the biggest challenge to overcome with cutting Rodgers after two seasons with Gang Green. He would be a dead-cap hit of $49 million for 2025 if he were to be released after this season. While we have seen the NFL salary cap grow every year since COVID, that is a helluva lot of dead money to eat if you are the Jets, folks.

For that to happen, you would need majority owner Woody Johnson to fire pretty much everyone under the sun associated with the Jets. Not only would Rodgers be out of a job, but so would head coach Robert Saleh, general manager Joe Douglas and so many more people connected to this team. If the Jets were to go something like 5-12 this year and Rodgers is awful, then I could see it.

While none of those plausible scenarios are entirely within the Jets’ control, they would also need the Cowboys to screw up catastrophically. It would require Cowboys owner Jerry Jones to let Prescott play out the final season of his four-year deal at $40 million AAV. He would then go to market, and the Jets would have to pay him something absurd like $60 million annually to go be a top-10 quarterback.

Essentially, you would be looking at a brand-new Jets team with a new head coach, general manager and quarterback. Yes, you would have some nice draft picks to work with, but you would be spending roughly $110 million to have Prescott quarterback your team and for Rodgers to take a hike. Money is abundant, but I don’t think Johnson would be willing to pay that much for one position to go … 10-7.

If we want to live by Hanlon’s razor of not mistaking incompetence for malice, the starting quarterback for the 2025 Jets will be Rodgers and the starting quarterback for the 2025 Cowboys will be Prescott. But for financial reasons, if I could only pick one to be on his current team a year from now, the obvious answer would be Rodgers because of the brutal dead-cap hit it would cost the Jets.

If Prescott is not back with the Cowboys, he is more likely to go to Nashville than to East Rutherford.