Are the Jets Making Room for Aaron Rodgers?

Three big questions have surrounded Aaron Rodgers this NFL offseason. The first is whether or not he would conclude his days as a professional football player and join the ranks of the retired. (He wouldn’t be the only quarterback to do so after the 2022 season, after all.) The second and third stem from that: if he does continue playing, would he return to the Packers or venture elsewhere — like, say, to the waiting arms of the New York Jets?

Rodgers’s decision-making process has included going on a darkness retreat, and he’s said that he’ll announce his decision relatively soon. But there are other ways to make an educated guess about Rodgers’s next move — for instance, seeing if a team he’s been linked with made moves of their own to free up some salary cap space.

Which, spoiler alert, is precisely what the Jets have done. ESPN’s Rick Cimini reports that the Jets restructured the contracts of Tyler Conklin, D.J. Reed and Laken Tomlinson with the goal of freeing up $15.2 million towards the league’s salary cap. As Cimini notes, this follows the restructuring of another contract, that of C.J. Uzomah.

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Those moves, along with releasing Braxton Berrios, have saved the Jets around $23 million. Admittedly, as Cimini pointed out, the Jets were already above the salary cap for the coming season. Perhaps these moves are just cost-saving measures — but they certainly seem like they’re being made for a specific reason. For now, though, Rodgers watchers will need to sit tight and wait for his next move.