A Cousins for Rodgers Trade? It’s Fate, Isn’t It?
Tom Woldum
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While covering this week’s big NBA trade, in which Portland’s Damian Lillard was traded to the Milwaukee Bucks, The Athletic’s David Aldridge and Sam Amick referenced one of the all-time greats of journalism, Ben Bradlee.
The Executive Editor of The Washington Post during the Watergate years was quoted as saying he “used to live for what he called “Holy (bleep)!” stories. (Fill in the bleep at your discretion.) … they were those rare stories that would, literally, make people reading them stop a paragraph or two into them and exclaim “Holy (bleep)!”
The Athletic noted that the Lillard trade surely fit Bradlee’s definition for the NBA faithful, and so too would this one, for their NFL counterparts: Kirk Cousins, traded from the Vikings to the New York Jets, straight up. Has that “Holy (bleep)!” ring to it, doesn’t it? Cousins for Rodgers.
Why Would the Jets Trade Rodgers for Cousins?
First and foremost, the Jets went ALL in this year to acquire Rodgers. This was their signal to their fans that they believed in their squad, and believed that they could compete for a Super Bowl title. All those who believe this is still even a faint possibility with Zach Wilson stepping in for Rodgers, please raise your hand. Yeah, I didn’t think so.
So, we’re all in agreement that the Wilson-led Jets are toast. Some of us might say that as long as they are playing in the same division and conference as the Miami Dolphins, they are still toast. But let’s forget that and look at another significant factor: the Jets play in New York City.
In a sports town where the Jets have languished in the same stratosphere as the New York Hustlers of Major League Pickleball Fame, they had to do something dramatic to be fully relevant again, and they did in signing Rodgers. But the week one blowout of Rodgers’ Achilles changed everything in a hurry.
Nearby, the New York Mets were basically screening the same film this summer. The ’23 Mets signed a pair of aging aces in Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander, saw both of them spend extended time on the disabled list, and saw their team rapidly fall out of contention.
Their owner Steve Cohen is the MLB’s richest owner, made famous for shruggingly commenting that “it’s just money” when spending a half-billion dollars on new contracts. The Mets did not hesitate to sign off on a fast pivot when their star faded, shipping Scherzer to the Rangers and Verlander to the Astros, while agreeing to continue paying most of their exorbitant salaries, in exchange for young prospects.
Now the Jets find themselves in a similar situation, but have the opportunity to save their season–something the Mets failed to do. All it would take would be a fast pivot, as the Mets did, dump the star they just signed earlier in the year, as the Mets, and cash in their broken-down Rodgers on a slightly newer model in Cousins. No messing around with prospects, hit the home run the Mets failed to hit. Cousins for Rodgers.
Why Would the Vikings Trade Cousins for Rodgers?
Three games into Year 2 of GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah’s “Competitive Rebuild” (his words, not mine), the Vikings find themselves 0-3, bringing the “Competitive” part of that rebuild into serious question. Even as the Viking faithful seem to have finally come to terms with Kirk Cousins being an above-average quarterback off to a highly-above-average start to the season, the angst surrounding the Quarterback position continues to build, both among fans and no doubt among the front-office decision-makers. He’s 35.
His contract expires at the end of the season. The Vikings are perpetually in salary-cap purgatory and may not be in the mood for another monster contract. Nobody, seemingly, really believes that Jaren Hall, the Vikings’ 5th round pick and the twelfth quarterback taken in the 2023 draft, is the long-term answer. The 2024 Draft looms with the consensus opinion being there’s two difference-makers among college QBs (Caleb Williams of USC and Drake Maye of North Carolina) and both may be off the board by pick #5.
Trading Cousins for Rodgers, injured and unavailable until 2024, would be so crazy that it just might work. And by “work”, I mean create so much hysteria, and leave such a tremendous void at the position in 2023, that the Vikings would simply slide into chaos, their offense would evaporate with Nick Mullen and Hall sharing time under center, and they would lose the requisite number of games (14? 15? 16?) to make that Top 5 pick a reality.
For those of us buying tickets or watching from home, it would be nothing short of misery for the next 3 months. But it would set things up for the scenario that seems to have been fated from the start of Rodger’s career as a starting Quarterback.
Will History Repeat Itself?
You all know where I’m going here. Once upon a time, one of the all-time great Quarterbacks in NFL history, and the leader of the Vikings’ arch rivals in Green Bay, grew unhappy. He was aging out of his role, but believed he had plenty left in the tank.
The Packers went ahead and drafted his replacement anyway, and forced that replacement to sit, watch, and learn for three seasons. When the situation became too tenuous, he was shipped to the New York Jets, where he did little and was quickly injured. The Jets allowed him to escape, and a year later, Brett Favre was leading the Minnesota Vikings to within one interception (and one Sean Payton-engineered Bountygate) from a Super Bowl. His understudy, obvi, was one Aaron Rodgers.
The moment Rodgers became a Jet we all had to wonder, could this be the start of some strange series of mechanisms that leads our respected nemesis down the same crazy pathway back to where he belonged all along, here in Minnesota, wearing purple and leading our squad to greater heights?
As I write this, the thunder and lightning has quite literally begun to roil across the sky, as if the mere suggestion is causing a cosmic tear and the gods of fate must be at war over the question. Is Cousins for Rodgers fated, just as Macbeth was fated to be King, as Favre was fated to join forces with his enemy, as Oedipus was, um, you know, fated to kill his dad and sleep with his mom?
From there, we can all imagine what happens. After an agonizing 2-15 season in which both Viking-Bear games end in 0-0 ties, the Vikings draft their long-term answer at Quarterback with the #3 pick. Drake Maye sits on our bench for two seasons, watching a healed and rejuvenated Rodgers lead the Vikings to their first Super Bowl in nearly 50 years before losing to Sean Payton’s new soulless employer, the Denver Broncos.
Rodgers will miss the second half of the Super Bowl game after being clubbed in his Achilles with a lead pipe by the same guy who Tanya Harding once hired. Two years after the fact, another “Holy (bleep)!” story will unfold: Harding will admit live on the set of WeTV reality show “Love After Lockup” that Sean Payton had called and asked for an introduction, and the NFL will again suspend Payton for one season but refuse to award the Super Bowl Trophy to Minnesota retroactively.
Maye will, of course, learn from one of the great ones for two years and then go on to have an NFL career that closely resembles that of Christian Ponder. Because it’s the Vikings, and this is a Tragedy.
If It’s Fate, Why Won’t It Happen?
If you were paying attention a few paragraphs back, you noted the comparison to Shakespearean and Greek Tragedies. And if you’ve been paying attention the last, oh, 63 seasons, you know that the Vikings’ pursuit of a Super Bowl Championship is itself nothing sort of a tragedy. The Cousins for Rodgers trade even happening, Rodgers succeeding where Favre fell short, or, Maye outperforming Ponder, may be moot questions. Maybe that’s not even what the Fates have in mind.
Playing with the Fates is tricky business. After all, Oedipus had no idea that that woman he was sleeping with was his mom, Jocasta. That discovery was, perhaps, the original “Holy (bleep)!” moment. When they finally figured it out, she killed herself and he gouged his own eyes out—something that maybe we’ve all wanted to do after watching some of these recent Vikings defeats.
But I digress. The point is, we don’t know what exactly the Vikings’ fate looks like, or how it’s worded. Maybe they’re fated to get Rodgers. Or maybe they’re fated to do nothing, halfway recover from a slow start, end up 8-9, and select Deion Sanders’ kid from Colorado as the next in a long line of pretty-good-but-he’s-not-Rodgers/Mahomes/Brady quarterbacks.
Then there’s Justin Jefferson. He hasn’t signed his extension yet, and it’s hard to imagine he would put pen to paper with a team that was sinking to the depths of tanking for an entire season—nor, with one who would force him to try and catch passes from the B- and C-squad quarterback for three-fourths of a season.
Finally, there’s Human Pride, another great theme in tragedies. Kwesi, Kevin O’Connell, the Vikings players, even us fans have our pride on the line here. Nobody’s going to willingly go along with the most blatant tank job in the history of the NFL, which is of course what this scenario would really be.
Nobody wants to be part of that many losses when in the back of the minds of all involved, we’d know there were wins left on the table. This isn’t Mark Madsen clanking threes for a few games for the Timberwolves at the end of a long NBA season, this would be a season-long agenda of quitting. I don’t see it happening. As fun as it is to think about a Rodgers reprise of the Favre year, I just don’t think I could endorse it in the end.
But, you know, I have to admit that in a perverse way, watching it play out would be kind of entertaining. And, it would be better than gouging my eyes out with a sharp pin. But who’s to say I wouldn’t do that anyway, watching one loss after another? Shakespeare would tell you: that’s just how fate works.
