On the evening of Monday, September 11, 2023, the mood was somber but optimistic at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. The New York Jets had signed Aaron Rodgers—the Super Bowl XLV–winning, four-time league MVP quarterback for the Green Bay Packers—in the hopes of energizing a flagging (some might say doomed) franchise that hadn’t won a title since 1969, when coach Wilbur “Weeb” Ewbank and “Broadway Joe” Namath won the first championship game officially billed as a Super Bowl. The intervening half-century had been unkind to the Jets. But Rodgers was going to change all that.

Summer is hell for football fans. The long months between the annual NFL draft and the post–Labor Day kickoff mark an interminable lull in the action. Speculation fills the void. In the 2023 offseason, conjecture about Rodgers had run wild. As he agonized over leaving Green Bay, his home for two decades, Rodgers courted other franchises. He mulled the decision while stewing for four days in a pitch-black cave at a “darkness retreat” in southern Oregon.

Rodgers’s period of much-publicized private solitude felt like the culmination of years spent in the spotlight, his public persona contorting in strange, sometimes alienating ways. This handsome, all-American, Wheaties-box-type athlete had mutated into a celebrity crank: pushing various discredited conspiracy theories about vaccines and the 9/11 attacks, holding his own on The Joe Rogan Experience, headlining psychedelics conferences to talk about the life-changing potential of hallucinogenic teas. When the Jets finally signed Rodgers, enthusiasm ran off the rails. Pundits across the media were taking seriously the idea of a championship season; the Jets were suddenly Super Bowl contenders. This despite Rodgers closing out his final season with the Packers with an 8–9 record, missing the playoffs, and racking up the most interceptions he’d accumulated since his first season as a starter in 2008.

Expectations could not have been higher at the Jets’ first game that season, a home opener against their divisional rival, the Buffalo Bills. It being a September 11 game, and in New York (well, technically, New Jersey), the proverbial patriotism meter was cranked into the upper registers. A record 22.64 million people tuned in to ESPN’s Monday Night Football broadcast to watch the Jets’ next great hope run onto the turf, waving an American flag. Rapper Method Man was there, as were pop singer Justin Timberlake and actor Brian Baumgartner, best known as the bumbling Kevin from NBC’s The Office. For long-suffering Jets loyalists, it was already a moment of triumph—or, more importantly, of unbridled hope. As one fan told Ian O’Connor, the author of an unauthorized new biography of Rodgers, Out of the Darkness: “He was like Captain America running out there. I felt, finally, this is really happening. It’s like when you want to date that beautiful girl and it takes forever to build up the nerve to ask her out, and when you finally do, she says yes. That’s how I felt that night.” If only that moment could have lasted forever.

Instead, Rodgers was routed on his opening drive. On his fourth play as a Jet, he was sacked by Bills defensive end Leonard Floyd and then struggled to get up. Rodgers was taken to the team’s on-field medical tent and then into the locker room. Backup quarterback Zach Wilson stepped in and managed to lead the team to an improbable win over Buffalo. The next morning, Jets staff confirmed the worst: Rodgers had torn his Achilles’ tendon. His season was over, and the Jets’ Super Bowl hopes with it. The date with the prettiest girl in town had ended in heartache. Captain America was downed at the 40-yard line.

It was a tragedy, in the way that all sports injuries are tragic. The Jets’ own hard-luck history, and Rodgers’s outsize public personality, gave it a vaguely literary quality. Was this irony? Hubris? The New York Jets flying too close to the sun on wings made of a 39-year-old man? For some watching, there was likely a feeling of schadenfreude.

It may have been bad news for Rodgers, and especially for Jets diehards, but it was a gift for some. It gave the busybody sports press something more important than an impressive stat-line to pore over: It gave them a new narrative—or, rather, sustained a useful one. The (frankly delusional) will-they-or-won’t-they Super Bowl hopes of the hopeless New York Jets could be prolonged, at least for another season. It’s a moment that O’Connor captures well in his new book, and one of many that speaks to the (allegedly) variegated composition of his subject: Aaron Rodgers, a celebrity QB/superhero/nuisance who, increasingly, represents different things to different people.

Wall-to-wall prattling about professional sports, and about the National Football League specifically, results in talking points being recirculated endlessly among a class of professional writers, network pundits, and YouTubers: Will the Cowboys make it past the first round of the playoffs? Are the broadcasters cutting to Taylor Swift too much during Chiefs games? Such hot topics are turned over again and again, such that their basis in fact becomes irrelevant. Their importance has been talked—or commentated—into existence.

The so-called “mystery” of Aaron Rodgers proves a perfect example of such a plot. The idea of his elusive, enigmatic unknowability has by now become his defining characteristic, arguably eclipsing even his world-record-low touchdown/interception ratio. A 2017 magazine profile by sportswriter Mina Kimes was titled “The Search for Aaron Rodgers.” A forthcoming three-part Netflix documentary on the man is called Aaron Rodgers: Enigma. And Ian O’Connor’s biography is subtitled “The Mystery of Aaron Rodgers.” O’Connor is a veteran sports biographer—profiling the likes of Derek Jeter and Bill Belichick (among others)—and he does a good job of stoking the cryptic air that surrounds Rodgers. But his book gets no closer to piercing the veil, such as it is.

Instead, O’Connor crafts a ready-made sports narrative about a perpetual underdog who struggles against all odds to reach the highest echelon of athletic achievement. Much is made of Rodgers’s humble origins growing up in the Sacramento Valley, “a long-shot kid from upstate Chico…overlooked and undervalued.” Rodgers survived the underestimation of coaches and teammates, from Chico’s Pleasant Valley High School to Butte Community College to UC Berkeley, where he transferred as a junior and went on to set NCAA passing records. Snubbed in the 2005 NFL draft by the San Francisco 49ers, his favorite team as a child, he’d be snagged by the Green Bay Packers, where he was snubbed again by starting QB Brett Favre (himself a controversy magnet of a different stripe). Rodgers would go on to usurp Favre’s role, win a Super Bowl ring, and secure those four league MVP awards.

It’s a great come-from-behind story. But aren’t they all? Success in the NFL, especially at quarterback, is definitionally unlikely unless you’re a member of the Manning clan. The percentage of high school football players who even go pro is infinitesimally small: about 0.023 percent. If there’s a guiding insight in O’Connor’s extensive research and interviews (including a brief sit-down with Rodgers himself to fact-check some stories he’d collected), it’s that Rodgers didn’t merely survive underestimation—he thrived on it. Broadcaster Chris Collingsworth once joked on-air that a good way to motivate the Packers was to insult their quarterback.

This was true off the field, too. While Rodgers was free and easy with his money, spreading the wealth among family and friends, his munificence was always contingent. He’d cut out friends if he thought they were bad-mouthing him. And he has, for some years, been estranged from his immediate relations, which O’Connor attributes to a blowout family squabble between Rodgers’s parents, Ed and Darla, and his then-girlfriend, actress Olivia Munn. “Rodgers was never one to move past perceived slights easily,” O’Connor writes. “He held on to grudges like he held on to a football—with a firm grip.”

This mean-spirited streak is contrasted with anecdotes and descriptions of Rodgers’s buoyant spirit and boundless magnanimity: “one of the most generous humans I’ve ever met,” someone possessing a “beautiful humility” and (in the words of former Packers tackle David Bahktari) “a bigger heart than he even knows.” O’Connor recounts a story about a Packers Christmas party where Rodgers gifted a practice-squad player with a new Ford Bronco during a spirited game of Yankee swap. Of course, human beings are famously complex animals; every person ever born contains multitudes. But Rodgers, we’re pressed to believe, contains more than the average person. It’s all part and parcel of the puzzlement that is Aaron Rodgers.

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But how unknowable is Rodgers, really? The details of his personal life, and his views on any range of subjects—from Mike McCarthy’s coaching (“low football IQ”) to his deep interest in Operation Northwoods, a proposed false-flag operation concocted by the Department of Defense in 1962 to incite war with Cuba—are all matters of public record. In 2011, Rodgers took a weekly gig cohosting an hour-long AM radio program in Milwaukee. From that perch, he gabbed about everything from the goings-on in the NFL to rumors about his own sexuality. (Some gossips have long speculated that Rodgers is gay, a pretty much baseless rumor that Rodgers himself has denied and that O’Connor rejects as likely untrue, and also totally irrelevant.) And Rodgers’s celebrity extends well beyond the sports media ecosystem. Before the brothers Manning and Kelce blanketed network TV to advertise any product whatsoever, Rodgers was the face of nationwide campaigns for State Farm, Pizza Hut, Adidas, and other brands. In 2015, he appeared as a contestant on Celebrity Jeopardy!, handily trouncing astronaut-senator Mark Kelly and Shark Tank business guru Kevin O’Leary (who finished with $0). And in 2021, as host Alec Trebek was recovering from cancer treatment, Rodgers performed admirably as a fill-in Jeopardy! host. He has lived in the public eye for the better part of two decades. And still people treat him like he’s J.D. Salinger.

The world arguably knows more about Aaron Rodgers than they do about any other currently rostered athlete. (Or at least one who doesn’t have their own podcast.) This is especially true in the years since the Covid-19 pandemic, when Rodgers rebranded himself as a vaccine skeptic and all-purpose loudmouth, a “do-your-own-research” guy whose misgivings about Big Pharma had metastasized into a more fulsome conspiracy-bro persona. (Of course, Rodgers’s anti-vax scruples were not so pronounced as to preclude his accepting a $112.5 million contract with the New York Jets, a team owned by the heir to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical fortune.)

Elsewhere, Rodgers has garnered attention for all manner of ostensibly outré practices and beliefs: having a nearly religious attachment to psychedelics like magic mushrooms and ayahuasca (which he has called “life-altering”); maintaining that both the HIV/AIDS and Covid-19 epidemics were somehow engineered by the federal government; thinking that 9/11 and the 2013 Sandy Hook massacre were inside jobs; and, perhaps most fancifully, nurturing the harebrained, pseudo-historical idea that an ancient Russo-Slavic Empire called Great Tartaria, known for its massive architectural marvels, used to stretch across half the globe before being wiped out by a massive mud flood. Rarely does a thought half-form in Rodgers’s mind before it’s repeated, in some mangled form, on one podcast or another. Meanwhile, the public has no idea what Jalen Hurts thinks about jet fuel’s ability (or supposed inability) to melt steel beams, or if Jacoby Brissett is a Slavonic supremacist. Even when Rodgers sits in the dark, doing absolutely nothing, it’s news.

While recovering from his busted Achilles, Rodgers accepted $1 million for a regular spot on The Pat McAfee Show, a daily sports chat show on ESPN famous for its barking, sleeveless host and frat house atmosphere. There, Rodgers again trashed vaccination (and Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, who lent his considerable celebrity to a Pfizer ad) and openly workshopped a theory that late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel palled around with Jeffrey Epstein. It was about what one can expect—and count on, to drive viewership—from a weekly Rodgers guest spot.

To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, there’s very little “there” there when it comes to Aaron Rodgers. He is (bracketing Joe Rogan or RFK Jr., who eyed Rodgers as a potential running mate) merely the most famous version of a very modern, very boring type of guy: the self-styled autodidact whose opposition to institutional authority comes with a Xeroxed curriculum of “heterodox” thinkers, writers, and podcasters. Nothing he believes—or publicly entertains as a belief—is actually that interesting. He regurgitates the most bog-standard quasi-conspiratorial theories. Likewise, there’s nothing particularly unusual about taking mind-expanding drugs. People take them all the time and have done so for centuries (even millennia), whether for spiritual exploration or the novelty of doing so. The most fascinating thing about these beliefs and practices is that Aaron Rodgers is the one espousing them. Formerly a perennial MVP favorite, Rodgers recently topped a different ballot: A poll of 3,000 NFL fans voted him the league’s “Most Annoying Player.”

Out of the Darkness, then, is a book with an empty center: It offers no deep accounting or speculating on the details of Rodgers’s interior life. (One could imagine a Gary Wills–style “psycho-biographical” treatment, even if such a project would risk collapsing into parody.) Still, late in the book, O’Connor breaks from recounting Rodgers’s best games and most impressive stats to poke, cautiously, at the quintessence of Rodgers’s whole deal. He arrives at the conclusion that his subject “always appeared to be searching for something out there to make himself more whole.” Maybe so. But again, that’s not really that unique or mysterious.

Mulling the more immanent motives for Rodgers’s crank turn, O’Connor skates over the most obvious, and self-evidently true, explanation he offers: that Rodgers was “a relentless attention seeker who was hyper-aware of everything said and written about him, and who needed to create news cycles to avoid the one thing he feared most—irrelevance.” Puzzle solved. At the risk of diminishing the mystery, threaded into a curiosity, woven into an enigma-quilt that is Aaron Rodgers, there really doesn’t seem to be much more to it than that. Like all people who court fame, however coyly, Rodgers enjoys being famous. And as his relevance in the NFL wanes due to declining play and injuries, he has sought to sustain the public’s interest in him by other means—specifically, by creating controversy.

That controversy has followed him to New York. It has been an especially exasperating, ignominious season for the New York Jets, and for its would-be savior. After a string of embarrassing losses, the Jets fired their head coach by the fifth week of the season. In mid-October, Rodgers lured former Packers teammate Davante Adams from the Las Vegas Raiders to East Rutherford, hoping to rekindle some spark. A month later, the team fired their general manager. The Jets kept losing, and their chances of a playoff berth is now a statistical impossibility. There have been flashes of the old, MVP-calibre Aaron Rodgers. There has also been talk of benching him for the backup. Or of Rodgers moving on again this off-season, to another struggling team. That latter option would be a shame. In Rodgers, the Jets may have finally found a star who can match their dysfunction, and their contested reputation, which lies somewhere between “legendary” and “laughing stock.”