I am under no illusion that the latest season of Hard Knocks was ever going to be explicitly harsh to Aaron Rodgers.
For many with and around the New York Jets organization, as a legitimate franchise quarterback, he is already the savior, the “second coming,” and I don’t think that’s a remotely hyperbolic statement.
But man, after the first episode, I’m shocked we received almost an hour of what essentially amounted to, “Aaron Rodgers is so great; He has never done anything wrong in his football life. And also, he’s very handsome.” Okay, the last part is fabricated, but you get the point.
As USA TODAY Sports’ Jim Reineking noted, in a 53-minute-long story, HBO elected to give us what felt like 45 minutes of the future Hall of Fame quarterback. He may as well have been featured in every frame.
Did HBO use the opportunity to tell us an intriguing account about Rodgers most people didn’t know? Was there any real context provided on why Rodgers is wearing Jets cosmic green in the first place? You know, his awkward breakup with the Green Bay Packers. Remember that whole thing the NFL world has rightfully been fixated on every offseason for the last few years?
Does that ring a bell?
No, they did not.
What HBO did give loyal Hard Knocks viewers was sanitized Jets fan service. It was so egregious that Disney should’ve been taking notes for its latest shamelessly lazy Star Wars cash grab, er, an offering made with creativity and love.
They showed us Rodgers being positively obsessed with actor Liev Schreiber. They gave us a taste of Rodgers being “goofy” and a “fun teammate” — haha, isn’t that 39-year-old multimillionaire so silly and relatable? We even got an on-the-nose montage about Rodgers giving the Jets the “shivers” with a contemporary love song. Oh, and he’s clearly being identified as the comely elder statesman who has a lot of wisdom to pass on to his whippersnapper teammates. How convenient!
It’s not as if there weren’t any references to Rodgers being a lightning rod of criticism who pouted his way out of Green Bay and painted the “evil media” as The Enemy at every turn. There were more than a few instances where a random Jets player evidently got specific camera time to break the fourth wall and say, “All the things you hear about Aaron [Rodgers] on TV? Not true!!!” It started happening so much that I finally realized this was a Rodgers brand rehabilitation, not a candid tale about a future Hall of Famer joining a perennial AFC basement dweller.
And that’s … fine. Maybe not that’s what Hard Knocks does anymore — tell complete stories with new information we didn’t know before. Maybe I shouldn’t expect instant classics like the outrageous 2001 Baltimore Ravens edition. Two decades later, it’s a different era, and most pro football teams seemingly treat their inner workings like secret codes for an atomic bomb launch.
The Jets are no different. After all, they reportedly didn’t even want to do this year’s Hard Knocks in the first place and only did so because they’d get more editorial control. Well, we saw how that strategy worked out in the first episode.
If you’re a Jets fan, you likely already wanted a generous second helping of all Aaron Rodgers: Divine Being, all the time, right away. Don’t worry. You’re presumably going to get more. If you’re a passionate football fan looking for a captivating narrative that doesn’t shy away from the truth: you should probably look elsewhere.