Mike Lupica: It’s time for Aaron Rodgers to own up to his irresponsible ramblings

The season will officially and mercifully end on Sunday, in Foxboro, Mass., against old friend Bill Belichick. But season, even if the actual football part of it only lasted four plays, just goes on and on. And on. As Rodgers just keeps talking. So far, it’s as if the Jets traded for Joe Rogan. Rodgers just played four more downs than Rogan did.

This past week, of course, Rodgers finally talked too much and went too far when he went after Jimmy Kimmel. Everybody knows Aaron Rodgers has been suffering from a severe case of hurt feelings from the time Kimmel first started making fun of him. So there he was, doing his weekly frat house spot on Pat McAfee’s show and for some reason the subject of Jeffrey Epstein came up, and the list of people who might have associated with the known pedophile until he hung himself in a New York City jail.

This is what Rodgers said: “There’s a lot of people, including Jimmy Kimmel, really hoping that [list] doesn’t come out.” It was irresponsible, malicious, and plain stupid. But now his next appearance with McAfee has become appointment television for people with nothing to do in the middle of the day, and a meathead controversy Rodgers started on that show will continue.

That’s if McAfee still has a show by next Tuesday after at the start of his Friday show, and showing himself to be as thin skinned as Rodgers is. But what Rodgers cannot do, if and when he addresses his comments on McAfee’s show, is say that he was kidding around. Go look at the video. He wasn’t kidding.

And can’t now line up behind , one softer than soft ice cream, McAfee describing what Rodgers said about Kimmel as just “s–t talk.” It was. Just not in the way Pat McAfee meant. Rodgers should do the stand up thing here, and say he was dead wrong for even suggesting Kimmel, a husband and father, had consorted with a known pedophile; not say that he’s apologizing if he offended anybody, always the default position for athletes in trouble; not say he was trying to be funny.

Right. Who doesn’t love a good pedophile joke? This is about more than what Disney and ESPN are going to do about McAfee, and about Rodgers. This is all about Rodgers himself needing to admit that after all his cockeyed theories about vaccines and UFO’s and psychedelics and darkness retreats, after his endless and uninformed nonsense about wokeness and Dr.

Fauci and even Travis Kelce, he did go too far with Kimmel, who was absolutely right to . We desperately need another Rodgers darkness retreat now. Just not for his benefit. For ours. Or maybe this really will go on and on, and Rodgers will continue to sound like the guy at the end of the bar who thinks he knows everything about everything.

It is a shame for him, and for the Jets, and for their fans most of all that he hurt his Achilles on Opening Night. It truly was the , him going down the way he did in the first quarter of the first game. But ever since, no one has been able to shut him up. And no New York athlete in memory has ever generated this many headlines and created this much noise for doing nothing on the field except throw a ball around once in a while.

Then he goes on the air and suggests that Kimmel should be worried about the release of the Epstein list. He does this as an ESPN sub contractor, on ESPN’s air. Afterward the best McAfee could do was say that he sure does hate being involved in anything negative. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be for Rodgers this season.

When he finally arrived in New York, he seemed to be doing everything right to introduce himself to the city, and make himself part of it. He went to concerts, Broadway shows, showed up at games, being carried along by the sound of applause. But along the way, he must have convinced himself, or been convinced, that the world was now hanging on his every word.

Even after he got hurt, he was still effectively sucking up all the oxygen around here, with his fever dream that he was going to come back and play for the Jets in December. And God forbid if you doubted him, because once you did you got treated like anybody who has ever disagreed with Aaron Rodgers.

He was right and you were the one who didn’t know what you were talking about. “Give me the timetables,” he said at one point. “Give me all the things you think can, should, or will happen, because all I need is one little percent of inspiration. Give me your doubts, give me your prognostications, and then watch what I do.” So he did throw the ball around some during pre game drills, and at practice, before he eventually announced that he wasn’t going to play, just because he was never going to play.

He had a right to want to play and a right to play, absolutely. But he was wrong about this the way he is wrong about an awful lot of things. But then this is the guy thinks people who take vaccines and woke people everywhere are the ones who need to have their heads examined. Should the Jets do everything but drag Rodgers off McAfee’s show.

Sure. Will they? You know better than that. For as long as he is here, and nobody has any idea how long he is going to be here, this is a football team named Rodgers. I cheered along with everybody else when the Jets made this trade. When Rodgers was at his best, I never saw a quarterback play the position better than he did.

I always thought if he’d been coached better than he was, especially by Mike McCarthy, that he would have played more than the one Super Bowl than he did. Even at 39 going on 40, I was hopeful, the way everybody else around here was, that he had enough arm left and enough game left to make the Jets matter again, maybe even mightily.

We’re still waiting for that kind of show, on the football field. For now Rodgers has become nothing more than a sideshow, not just playing to the lowest common denominator as frequently as he does, but sounding like part of it, as if he could be team captain. Finally he says what he says about Kimmel.

Now it’s time for the guy who doesn’t think he’s wrong about anything to final admit that he was. And stop acting as if the stage in New York, now that he finally has it, turns out to be too big for him. All week long people have been talking about the second down running play, ball being handed off to Saquon Barkley, at the end of Giants vs.

Rams. And all week long, I thought the question that needed to be addressed is why Tyrod Taylor and the Giants were spiking the ball with a first down, and 42 seconds left on the clock. If there had been any more dazzling offensive decisions in that moment, Mason Crosby would have been attempting that field goal at the end from the parking lot.

The other night Nikola Jokic won the best game of the NBA regular season, Nuggets against the Warriors, by making a Steph shot right in front of Steph. If nothing else, OG Anunoby makes the Knicks better on defense, and they sure did need to get better on defense, even if these guys are playing for Tom Thibodeau.

The second season of “Reacher” is terrific. The Lions got jobbed against the Cowboys, one hundred percent. The league can try to blame this on the offensive linemen of the Lions, but the Lions did everything they were supposed to do before that two point conversion attempt. The problem in the end was that they didn’t just confuse the Cowboys about the lineman eligible to become a receiver was.

They confused the holy hell out of the ref as well. The shame of this is that the ref blowing that call — and that is exactly what he did, whatever the league is trying to say now — may win the NFC East for the Cowboys. And that is big stuff. The guy who invented football, Sean Payton, just buried Russell Wilson, who was a lot better quarterback for the Broncos this season than Payton was a football coach.

You know who Payton is going to turn out to be in Denver? A guy who won somewhere else and then never won again. For those first three rounds in Brisbane, Rafa Nadal looked a lot more like the old Rafa than a 37 year old Rafa. Harrison Bader is starting to tour major league outfields the way the Ice Capades used to tour in the old days.

Pat McAfee should talk to Tucker Carlson if he thinks they can’t turn on the lights at his network without him. Wayne LaPierre just stepped down as the boss of the NRA, just ahead of his corruption trial. Wayne always said that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun was a good guy with a gun. But in this case, putting one on trial looks to be a pretty neat alternative.

Speaking of guns: If Aaron Rodgers really does think he can take on Jimmy Kimmel, he’s bringing a knife to a gunfight..