The final snap of Aaron Rodgers’s 2023 season started out like so many others in his career. It was a passing play designed for the quarterback to get the ball out quickly. But Rodgers didn’t like his initial option—a quick slant to Allen Lazard underneath—so he did what he always does when a play breaks down: He tried to make something happen.
After noticing that his options to the right were unavailable, Rodgers quickly shifted his eyes to the left, only to see Buffalo Bills end Leonard Floyd bursting through Duane Brown’s cut block and rushing straight at him. Most quarterbacks, especially those pushing 40, would have happily taken a sack or thrown the ball away in that spot. Not Rodgers. He’s spent the past two decades flipping dire situations like these into unforgettable highlights. But what happened next certainly wasn’t a highlight. Rodgers’s ankle got caught under Floyd as the two went to the ground, and that was that. Hours later, New York Jets coach Robert Saleh said what Rodgers’s face had already told us: that something was very wrong. And an MRI on Tuesday confirmed that Rodgers had torn his Achilles, ending his season in 2023 and raising questions about his NFL future beyond that.
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Whenever an athlete suffers a major injury at an advanced age, it’s only natural to wonder whether it’s a career ender. But Rodgers and the Jets got out ahead of that talk this week. Rodgers wrote on Instagram on Wednesday that he would “rise yet again.” The same day, Saleh said he’d be “shocked” if his quarterback retired in the offseason. Rodgers’s contract also runs through 2025 in New York, so there’s a financial incentive to return.
Even if Rodgers does return, though, concerns about his future with the Jets go far beyond that. This team didn’t mortgage its future—not only trading two second-round picks to Green Bay, but also tying up the budget by employing several of Rodgers’s buddies—just for the right to host the Canton-bound quarterback’s farewell tour. It traded for him to put the finishing touch on a roster that is ready to compete for a Super Bowl right now, as we saw on Monday night when a dominant defense and a young group of skill players dragged Zach Wilson to an overtime win over Buffalo.
A 40-something quarterback hobbled by a damaged Achilles wasn’t the finishing touch that general manager Joe Douglas had in mind when he swung the deal with Green Bay. If the Jets are going to salvage anything from this move, it won’t be enough for Rodgers to make it back to the field. He’ll have to make it back and play like the franchise-lifting quarterback they thought they were getting. And that is a more questionable proposition.
The average recovery time for an NFL player who suffers a torn Achilles is about nine months. By then, Rodgers will be 40 and nearly two years removed from his last productive NFL season. The track record of over-40 quarterbacks returning from major injuries is nonexistent because football careers don’t typically last that long, so it’s difficult to even set expectations for what Rodgers could look like upon return.
Achilles injuries also aren’t common for quarterbacks—we typically see players like linemen suffer them—so there’s no clear blueprint for what it might change in Rodgers’s performance. But we can expect his performance to be affected in some way. A 2017 study on NFL Achilles injuries by the American Orthopedic Foot and Ankle Society found that players return from them about 75 percent of the time. That sample includes players who may not have had a future in pro football regardless of health concerns, so the number would probably be a bit higher for established starters like Rodgers. That’s the good news. The bad news? That same study found that players who suffered an Achilles injury did not play as long as other players, that their performance dropped off after the return, and that age was a significant factor in that drop-off. Unsurprisingly, older players have had a harder time returning to the field and regaining their previous form.
The study did find that a player’s position played a key factor in post-injury performance. Linebackers and running backs had the most issues, which makes sense considering how much those players rely on short-area quickness and agility. For quarterbacks, though, the impact was less severe. The study found that quarterbacks threw for 60 fewer passing yards and five fewer touchdowns over the course of a season, on average. The touchdown number is a bit concerning, but touchdown passes are a notoriously volatile stat from year to year, so that could be noise. I’m not sure passing yards is a good measure of performance, either, but it’s not our fault the Foot and Ankle Society doesn’t know ball. This is all we have to work with, and the data suggests that quarterbacks have mostly been fine after returning from Achilles injuries.
It’s worth pointing out, though, that the study’s sample size included only five such injuries to quarterbacks. Using TruMedia’s injury report database, which stretches back to 2009, I found just one instance of a quarterback playing in games after being listed on the injury report with an Achilles injury. That was Tom Brady in 2017, who was hurt in a game against the Raiders when Khalil Mack fell on his ankle. Brady didn’t tear the tendon, and he played well enough down the stretch to lead the Patriots to the Super Bowl and win the league’s MVP award. That was his age-40 season.
To find an example of a star QB suffering a major Achilles injury like Rodgers, you have to go back to 1993, when Dan Marino went down in a game against the Browns. Marino told Kevin Clark of ESPN this week that the injury never properly healed, which changed the way he threw the football. Still, the Dolphins star performed better in the two years following the 1993 season than he had in the two seasons before it. And he even made two consecutive All-Pro teams after making his return.
Dan Marino, Before and After Achilles Injury
Marino’s mobility may have been limited, but his arm was not. He could still pull off throws like this:
But Marino was only 32 when he suffered his injury. Rodgers is 39. That difference can’t be ignored. Nor can we ignore Rodgers’s playing style when trying to predict how this will all play out.
The Rodgers model of quarterbacking doesn’t work if he can’t move. His game isn’t completely reliant on improvisation in and out of the pocket, but it’s one of the skills that set him apart from the rest of his generation of quarterbacks, who mostly stuck to the pocket. Marino was criticized for being a statue in the pocket well before he tore his Achilles, so the injury had no impact on his style of play going forward. That’s not going to be the case for Rodgers.
What’s concerning is that we already saw signs of Rodgers’s mobility waning before Monday night. In 2022, he got outside the pocket less than he did in his back-to-back MVP-winning campaigns. He set three-year lows in scramble rate, success rate, and completion percentage, according to TruMedia. And he averaged 5.49 yards and negative-0.07 expected points added per dropback on plays outside the pocket last year, compared to 6.3 yards and 0.38 EPA per dropback in 2020.
Rodgers Outside the Pocket, Since 2020
The play that spoiled the Jets’ 2023 season, and possibly the final years of Rodgers’s brilliant career, was proof that the aging quarterback is still struggling to make an adjustment as he reckons with his declining mobility.
There was a time not too long ago when a Rodgers spin move would have left Floyd in his dust—when he not only would have evaded the Bills pass rusher, but also would have turned an otherwise broken play into a big gain for the offense. In June, the Jets made a $113 million bet that Rodgers still had it in him to produce those moments of magic regularly. They bet that the quarterback who dragged the Packers to competency for years could still do the same for their franchise. After Monday night, the odds have never looked longer.
