Yes, it’s not easy to tiptoe around a delicate genius.
Three days after Jets coach Robert Saleh attributed five false starts to issues with the unique cadence employed by quarterback Aaron Rodgers, and two days after Saleh tried to shift the focus from “cadence” to “operation,” Saleh dismissed any effort to paint his word choice as a problem between himself and his quarterback.
“There is no cadence issue,” Saleh told reporter on Wednesday in response a question about the cadence issue. “There never was a cadence issue. It was created.”
It was created. And that’s not just some random existential observation. Saleh created it. Saleh used the word. Saleh attributed a quintet of false starts not to operation or to happenstance or to anything but “cadence.”
But Saleh has a reason to bend reality. He doesn’t want to end up on “the island.” That’s the place, as explained in Ian O’Connor’s Rodgers biography, where excommunicated friends and family members go when they say or do the wrong thing at the wrong time, making Rodgers feel the wrong way.
Look, we don’t blame Saleh for doing what he did. The organization sold its soul to the delicate genius a year ago, and the situation became necessarily worse when he spontaneously gave up more than $30 million in pay.
Woody Johnson owns the Jets. Aaron Rodgers currently runs the team. And everyone who gets paid by Woody needs to be ready to pay fealty to Rodgers. That’s all Saleh was doing on Monday, and again on Wednesday.