It was well after midnight and into the wee hours of March 13 in suburban New Jersey, when Jets GM Joe Douglas saw agent David Dunn’s number flash on his phone. The free-agent tampering period was set to begin in a matter of hours, at noon that Monday. Pro day season was underway, too. But there was nothing more important, in the moment, for Douglas, or for the Jets, than answering that call.
“Hey, man, I know it’s late out there,” said Dunn, calling on behalf of his star client. “Aaron wants to be a Jet.”
, of course, was Aaron Rodgers, and Douglas’s reaction was like Jonah Hill’s portrayal in of analytics legend Paul DePodesta (renamed Peter Brand in the movie) finalizing the Ricardo Rincon deal crossed with Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort closing a sale in . Yes, the Jets’ GM wanted to scream in exultation. But his kids and wife were sleeping, so all the fist pumps and skipping around the room had to happen in silence.
And happen they did.
Douglas first texted his coach, Robert Saleh, and team president, Hymie Elhai, to let them know—in all caps—that they were going to wake up to the best news they’d ever gotten. Douglas then poured himself a glass of Blanton’s single-barrel bourbon whiskey on the rocks. He turned on the TV. He couldn’t get to sleep until 3 a.m., his mind racing through all that would come in the aftermath of Dunn’s simple message.
Most of all, he thought, .
What Douglas knew, at that point, was that Rodgers would be a Jet. It’d sink in for Saleh fewer than 72 hours later, when the coach watched, from Douglas’s office, as Rodgers delivered the news they’d already gotten to the masses on . “Since Friday,” Rodgers said. “I made it clear that my intention was to play, and my intention was to play for the New York Jets.”
What remained was actually executing the trade, and the process of doing that, for both teams, was underway as well, if (as it turned out) only in its nascent stages.
Through the six weeks to follow, there were ups and downs, and fits and starts, and a lot of speculation on whether the deal would, in fact, get done. And lots of questions from the outside about how the biggest news story of the NFL offseason would find its conclusion, and whether, based on the lag time, it could all fall apart.
The truth was, for Douglas and Saleh, there was never any doubt. Or really any choice. They had to get it done, and, indeed, 42 days after Douglas danced silently around his house and celebrated with that pricey glass of bourbon, it did get done.
