A busy week in the NFL just got a little weirder with the news that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may tap Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers to be Kennedy's running mate on the independent ticket for president of the United States. Currently, Rodgers and former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura are the top options, with Kennedy planning to announce his selection on March 26.
The Jets don't currently believe Rodgers will do that, according to a source familiar with the situation.
However, he did not tell them whether he would do so or not. He's been off the grid this week. As of Friday morning, they had not heard from him.
If he steps away from football to run, he will give up his $37.5 million salary. If he tried to run while playing football, he would create the same kind of distraction he said in his end-of-season press conference the team couldn't have.
“Anything that has nothing to do with winning needs to be evaluated,” Rodgers said at the time. “So anything in this building that we do individually or collectively that has nothing to do with real winning needs to be evaluated. . . . It's not a thing half the time, it's not a thing sometimes, it's not a thing most of the time, it's a thing all the time.” Once. If you want to be a winning organization, and put yourself in a position to win championships and be competitive, then everything you do matters, and the bullshit that has nothing to do with winning needs to get out of the building. So, that's going to be the focus going forward “
A vice presidential candidate begins his or her campaign, moving from state to state in the weeks and days leading up to the election. Rodgers will have at most one day a week to focus on active campaigns. Even then, it will remain a major distraction for planes.
For now, this appears to be little more than a short-term propaganda boost for Kennedy's long-running campaign. Look for Rodgers (who has yet to address the issue on social media, though he did take some time to post a partial denial of a CNN report that he's a Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist) to eventually say he's flattered by the opportunity but now he's not. The right time for him to enter the political arena. Far from helping his preferred candidate, the mere association with office will make his eventual entry into politics less troublesome — if that's what he ends up doing.
Then again, for anyone who knows Rodgers spent some time this week in a dark room and/or ingesting hallucinogens looking to figure out whether or not he should take the plunge. The fact that he will be competing against Common sense and a man in a wheelchair (Or, frankly, two guys who probably should be) could be enough to get him to make the most incredible move by a Jets quarterback since Joe Namath He announced his retirement Five months after winning the Super Bowl, due to a dispute with the league office over his ownership of a bar/restaurant in Manhattan where gamblers (GASP) were hanging out.
