49ers Reward Deommodore Lenoir with 5-Year, $92M Extension

transformed into Monday morning in Pittsburgh on Oct. 20, the New York Jets say little in their postgame locker room except whispers and slung helmets. Aaron Rodgers, whose rugged looks are framed by contorted features and almost equal parts gray facial hair and brunette hairline, leaned forward to his locker and gazed off into the horizon.

With blood on his hand, a hampering hamstring, a sore knee, a losing team, a 40-year-old body on the field, this was a Mihajlovic who appeared to be wondering whether this was the moment for such a final gamble. This – postgame locker room was a real National Football League. It stinks like blood and sweat and soil and has no relation to the glamour that is involved in pre-game introductions.

Here, big men take off their shoes, turn away from the showers, set their helmets down, curl then relax their fingers to ensure they still have full control of them. There are yards and yards of athletic tape on the floor bloody red, grass green and mud brown. The same players who just hours before had gone through a tunnel holding clean jerseys now look into their lockers waiting for the pain to subside before they can stand up. Victory and defeat appear as glory and a complete disgrace; they both sound repulsive; both cause pain. They just sound different.

In this Jets locker room where sounds of victory fairly echoed, the absence of every man besides Rodgers could be easily explained. They have to begin something, or perhaps finish it. They’re running after the money and fame he has had close to two decades, or perhaps they have caught it, and they are left wondering what to do next with it. They all live for the rush.

But here Rodgers seems uncomfortable. He boasts a large white steripad on the back of his left hand and his eyes do not gleam with their accustomed cynical glee. He has had pain in his knee for a few weeks now and in his hamstring for the past several hours. He is certainly among the best ever in this sport, and he is arguably among the strongest. Since trading for him before last season, the Jets have tried to build a team of themselves to suit the player.

They had already hired his best friend Nathaniel Hackett to call the same offense that Rodgers did in Green Bay. They have given him a bouquet of ex Packers receivers starting from last season with Lazard and Cobb, the latter currently an analyst with SEC Network, and finally acquiring Adams and Rodgers’ buddy in mid-October from the Raiders.

In a way, the Jets took their franchise — which had the NFL’s longest drought between playoff berths by the start of 2018, 2010 in the case of the Jets, who are part of the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL, — and gave it to Rodgers with a blank cheque basically. Here you go. Have a look at what you can do with this. Last year was a wash, with Rodgers getting injured at around week 17, and the most microscoped four-snap season in NFL history.

But they have done all of that through 10 games this season, through the dismissal of head coach Robert Saleh and Jeff Ulbrich’s promotion, through Hackett’s demotion and Todd Downing’s promotion, through the Adams trade and Reddick holdout, only to establish themselves as masters of new, fresher, and even sadder ways to lose. They began the season with designs on a championship, the team’s first in 55 years, and are left with an odd identity: bad but fascinating – a thing that can barely be achieved. Rodgers is in one of his worst seasons by any measure anyone wants to take.

” His QBR of 52.0 is 24th in the NFL and his yards per attempt (6.4) are accruing a rate that is lower than any other season that he has played since he became a starter in 2008. He has exceeded the double-digit interceptions in only three of his 16 seasons as a starter, and never more than 13 but this season he is already on seven after 10 games. If in general so many things depend on the quarterback — the offence, the personnel, the strategies — it only makes sense that he becomes the centerpiece they are all built around, the sun that the rest of the system revolves around.