Culture
If Giants don’t land Aaron Rodgers, then what? Exploring pros, cons of NY’s backup plans
One eternity later …
Cue the SpongeBob SquarePants meme as the football world awaits a resolution to the Aaron Rodgers saga. (It’s been long enough that we can call it that, right?) The 41-year-old, four-time MVP is biding his time as he waits to see if the Minnesota Vikings would like to pursue a partnership. If they don’t, Rodgers could simply retire and leave the QB-desperate Pittsburgh Steelers and New York Giants with few inspiring options left to choose from.
But, it seems as long as they’re still in play for Rodgers, the Giants and Steelers are (somewhat) content to wait. Three teams all tied together with no real deadline in sight. Fun, right?
However, the Giants, with Tommy DeVito the only QB on the roster, haven’t been waiting idly. They’ve been doing their homework on what Plan C — swing-and-a-miss on Matthew Stafford, swing-and-a-miss on Rodgers — would look like should the ex-Jets QB not desire a return to New York.
To recap their work so far: The Giants have hosted veterans Joe Flacco, Russell Wilson and Jameis Winston for visits. They also were reportedly conducted a video call with Mason Rudolph, but the backup QB wound up signing with the Steelers.
The Giants, of course, are wise to explore veteran contingency plans with no end in sight to the Rodgers saga and the possibility that he could simply walk away from the game rather than suit up for any team in 2025.
So, what exactly do those contingency plans look like? That’s what we’re here to find out as we dive into the pros and cons of each of the Giants’ less-preferred options:
Russell Wilson, 36 years old
Pros
After Rodgers, Wilson is probably the best remaining option on the free-agent market and the only other QB the Giants could realistically sell as a functional full-time starter for 2025.
Wilson is a Super Bowl champion and proven winner, having guided the Seattle Seahawks to the playoffs eight times and the Steelers to the playoffs last season. He threw for 2,482 yards and 16 touchdowns in 11 appearances last year. Wilson’s five interceptions matched his career low in Seattle in 2019 (of course, that came in 16 games), but his interception rate (1.5 percent) was among the lowest rates in the NFL last year. Wilson also tallied just five fumbles, so he does a good job of protecting the football.
Wilson also still throws a gorgeous deep ball, meaning he could help add an explosive element to New York’s offense, which desperately needs to produce more big plays. With the Steelers, 14.4 percent of Wilson’s pass attempts resulted in explosive plays (16-plus yards), per TruMedia, a mark that ranked 14th in the NFL and was worlds better than what the Giants got from Daniel Jones (8.9 percent, last in the NFL) last season.
More big plays is what the Giants hope to coax out of Malik Nabers in Year 2, and it aligns well with the recently re-signed Darius Slayton’s skill set. Perhaps even the speedy Jalin Hyatt, who has done little through two years in New York, could benefit from playing with Wilson.
Before moving onto Wilson’s cons, I wanted to briefly highlight the pickle the Giants would be in if they don’t sign Rodgers or Wilson.
If they don’t end up with one of those two … yikes. The nightmare scenario is losing out on both of those quarterbacks while the Tennessee Titans prepare to take Miami quarterback Cam Ward at No. 1 in the upcoming NFL Draft — and that looks like what they’re doing, since they haven’t been significant players in the veteran QB market this offseason outside of signing backup Brandon Allen to a one-year deal. The Giants would likely be forced to draft a QB at No. 3, and if Ward isn’t there, whomever they take could be classified as a significant reach — especially if they’re passing on Penn State pass rusher Abdul Carter or Colorado WR/CB Travis Hunter.
With Wilson (or Rodgers), the Giants should still plan to draft a QB at some point early on, but there would be less desperation to make a pick with a veteran capable of starting Week 1.
OK, onto the cons:
Cons
While Wilson took the Steelers to the playoffs, the team finished on a five-game losing streak, including a relatively non-competitive 28-14 loss to the Ravens in the wild-card round. That’s hardly encouraging. While Wilson protects the ball in terms of limiting turnovers, he also holds onto the ball for way too long and takes a lot of sacks.
Wilson’s sack percentage over the past three seasons is a dreadful 9.5 percent. Among quarterbacks with at least 1,000 dropbacks in that span, that’s the third-worst rate behind only Justin Fields (11.9 percent) and … Jones (9.6 percent).
The Steelers also haven’t made a strong push to bring Wilson back as they pursue Rodgers and initially prioritized re-signing Fields before he signed with the Jets. That doesn’t seem like a great sign.
It’s also worth mentioning that Wilson has been in the Giants building twice the past two offseasons, and no deal has been made. Last year, the Giants told him Jones would be the starter, so he went to Pittsburgh. This time, the Giants are waiting on Rodgers, but it’s pretty clear they’re not exactly enamored with Wilson.
Jameis Winston, 31 years old
Pros
It won’t be boring.
Just look at Winston’s Super Bowl highlight reel from New Orleans as a Fox Sports correspondent. Winston would bring a fun personality to New York, and his play on the field certainly wouldn’t be dull either. He’s a human highlight reel — you just never know if it’s going to be an offensive or defensive highlight.
The last time Winston, the No. 1 overall pick of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2015, started 16 or more games, he became one of nine quarterbacks in NFL history to throw for 5,000 yards. Those yards came with 33 touchdowns. (OK, I know we’re in the “pros” section, but I feel obligated to mention those 33 TDs also came with a breathtaking 30 interceptions, as the Bucs went 7-9 and missed the playoffs.)
After leaving Tampa, Winston spent four seasons in New Orleans before playing 2024 in Cleveland. With the Browns, Winston started seven games — his most since 2021 — and threw for 2,121 yards and 13 touchdowns. (Again, I must mention that he also threw 12 interceptions and went 2-5 as a starter.)
Winston, like Wilson, will happily heave it downfield. His rate of explosive pass plays (13.8 percent) was in line with Wilson and slightly ahead of the next guy on this list (Flacco, 13.5 percent). So, again, the Giants would be injecting some big-play ability into their offense.
Winston is also the youngest of these visitors, which has to count for something when thinking about the future. Could he enjoy a late-career breakout? Probably not, but you never know. The last item in Winston’s favor is the price tag. He likely won’t cost nearly as much as Rodgers or even Wilson. Winston’s deal with Cleveland last season was worth a maximum of $8.7 million.
Cons
It wouldn’t be boring.
So, yeah, about those interceptions. Before 2019, no QB had thrown 30 interceptions in one season in more than 30 years (Vinny Testaverde threw 35 with the Bucs in 1988), and no QB has come close since.
With 111 career interceptions in 105 games, Winston has a career INT rate of 3.5 percent, including a 4.1 percent mark last year, which was second-worst in the league in 2024 behind only the Colts’ Anthony Richardson. Winston also was sacked 24 times in 12 games, so his negative plays rate is off the charts. If Giants coach Brian Daboll was throwing tablets out of frustration with Jones, Winston might just break Daboll’s brain.
Finally, if the Giants are trying to trade up for a QB — either up to No. 1 or perhaps back into the end of Round 1 — rivals teams might be able to exploit their desperation, as they’ll know the Giants aren’t committed to Winston and are still hunting for a long-term answer at QB.
Joe Flacco, 40 years old
Pros
This isn’t going to be a long list, but what were you expecting for a 40-year-old QB about to play for his sixth career team?
At the least, Daboll could trust Flacco to pick up his offense quickly and steer the ship as a veteran with 17 seasons of NFL experience. A former Super Bowl MVP, Flacco can still chuck it deep and looks to create big plays where he can. He also completed 65.3 percent of his passes last season, so he’s still pretty accurate.
Overall, he’s capable of brief spurts of quality play. He helped lead the Browns to the playoffs in 2023 with a solid five-game stretch that resulted in him winning the 2023 NFL Comeback Player of the Year award. Last season in Indy, he played well for a few weeks early on while filling in for an injured Richardson.
Finally, he shouldn’t be too pricey. With the Colts last season, Flacco signed a one-year deal worth up to $8.7 million with just $4.5 million guaranteed.
Cons
Father Time hasn’t been friendly to Flacco. He was never very mobile, but he doesn’t move much at all now, so if the Giants offensive line isn’t playing up to par — when has that ever happened, though? — good luck.
He also didn’t look great toward the end of the last season. When the Colts benched Richardson ahead of Week 9 and gave the job to Flacco, coach Shane Steichen said Flacco was the starter “going forward.” That lasted two weeks. He played so poorly in his two games as Indy’s starter — two losses that included a prime-time flop against Minnesota and three interceptions against Buffalo — that the Colts reversed course and turned back to Richardson.
Giants fans are also well acquainted with Flacco’s late-season struggles. He returned to the lineup, replacing an injured Richardson in Week 17, for a Colts team playing for its playoff life. Flacco and the Colts fell to a Giants team on a 10-game losing streak. Flacco turned the ball over three times in Indy’s 45-33 loss.
It’s pretty clear at this point Flacco is best-suited for a backup role.
And as with Winston, teams could exploit the Giants’ desperation to trade up during the draft knowing Flacco isn’t a long-term answer. It’s also worth mentioning that if the Giants do get a young QB in the building, Flacco doesn’t have the reputation as the type of QB to go out of his way to be a mentor.
Conclusion
None of these are great options for the Giants. They know it, too. That’s why they’re waiting on Rodgers, though it isn’t exactly clear how much better he’d actually be. Alas, the wait goes on.
(Photo of Russell Wilson: Scott Taetsch / Getty Images)
Mr. Mudimbe was unapologetic. “To the question ‘what is Africa?’ or ‘how to define African cultures?’ one today cannot but refer to a body of knowledge in which Africa has been subsumed by Western disciplines such as anthropology, history, theology or whatever other scientific discourse,” he told Callaloo. “And this is the level on which to situate my project.”
Valentin-Yves Mudimbe was born on Dec. 8, 1941, in Likasi, in the Katanga Province of what was then the Belgian Congo, to Gustave Tshiluila, a civil servant, and Victorine Ngalula. At a young age, he said in 1991, he “began living with Benedictine monks as a seminarist” in Kakanda, in pre-independence Congo. He had “no contact with the external world, even with my family, and indeed had no vacations.”
When he was 17 or 18, he recalled, he decided to become a monk, this time among the Benedictine “White Fathers” of Gihindamuyaga, in Rwanda. But in his early 20s, already “completely francophonized,” he abandoned the religious life and entered Lovanium University in Kinshasa, graduating in 1966 with a degree in Romance philology. In 1970 he received a doctorate in philosophy and literature from the Catholic University of Louvain, in Belgium. He then returned to Congo to teach.
In the 1970s Mr. Mudimbe published, among other writings, three novels, all translated into English: “Entre les Eaux” (1973), published in English as “Between the Waters”; “Le Bel Immonde” (“Before the Birth of the Moon,” 1976); and “L’Écart” (“The Rift,” 1979). The principal characters in these novels “find it impossible to tie themselves to anything solid,” the scholar Nadia Yala Kisukidi commented in Le Monde.
At the end of the 1970s, when the offer came from Mr. Mobutu to be “in charge of, I guess, ideology and things like that,” as Mr. Mudimbe put it to Callaloo, he reflected that “I didn’t think of myself and I still don’t think of myself as a politician.” After he established himself in the United States, his focus turned to essays and philosophy; among other books, he wrote “L’Odeur du Père” (1982), “Parables and Fables” (1991) and “Tales of Faith” (1997).
Someone once defined poetry as “memorable speech.” By that standard, each of us has committed at least some poetry to memory. Nursery rhymes, song lyrics and movie catchphrases all find their way into our heads, often without any effort on our part.
More formal memorization used to be a common classroom ritual. Schoolchildren would stand and recite approved works for their teachers and peers. That kind of learning has mostly gone out of fashion, which may be a sign of progress or a symptom of decline. Either way, school shouldn’t be the only place for poetry.
And learning a poem by heart doesn’t have to be drudgery. It can be a way of holding onto something beautiful, a morsel of verbal pleasure you can take out whenever you want. A poem recited under your breath or in your head can soothe your nerves, drive away the noise of everyday life or grant a moment of simple happiness.
At a time when we are flooded with texts, rants and A.I. slop, a poem occupies a quieter, less commodified corner of your consciousness. It’s a flower in the windowbox of your mind.
There are millions of them available, in every imaginable style, touching on every facet of experience. You could store a whole anthology in your brain.
But let’s start with one: “Recuerdo,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay.
“Recuerdo,” first published in 1919 in Poetry magazine, is the recollection of a night out on the town — or more precisely on the water, presumably the stretch of New York Harbor served by the Staten Island Ferry. We asked some friends of the Book Review — poets, novelists, playwrights, actors and other literature lovers — to recite it for us, and a bunch said yes.
Today, Ada Limón, Ina Garten and Ethan Hawke will introduce you to the poem. Here’s the first of the three stanzas.
Recuerdo
We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill–top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.
Ada Limón, U.S. poet laureate
Why did we pick “Recuerdo”? We combed through our shelves like Goldilocks, looking for a poem that was just right: not too difficult, but not too simple; not obscure but not a chestnut; not a downer but not frivolous either. We didn’t want a poem that was too long, and we thought something that rhymed would be more fun — and easier — to memorize than a cascade of free verse.
Millay, who was born in Maine in 1892 and was a fixture of the Greenwich Village bohemian scene in the 1920s, caught our eye for a few reasons. In her lifetime, she was a very famous poet.
She was a decidedly modern author who often wrote in traditional forms, and who has stayed popular through 100 years of fluctuating fashion. Her verse, while serious and sophisticated, carries its literary baggage lightly.
When you get to the second stanza of “Recuerdo,” read here by Ina Garten, you realize that it has a hook.
We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.
Ina Garten, cook and author
It’s a city poem, but one that incorporates some arresting nature imagery (the sun, the moon, the wan glow of dawn). It delivers a confidential message — addressed to a “you” who shares the memory of those moments by the fire and in the moonlight — while striking a convivial, sociable tone.
The poem concludes with an impulsive act of generosity that carries a hint of melancholy. Here’s Ethan Hawke, reading the third and final stanza.
We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl–covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.
Ethan Hawke, actor
That’s it. The night is over; another day is here with its obligations and routines; we’re about to trade the open air of the ferry for the crowded underground platforms of the subway.
This poem stands up to repeated readings. It stays in your mind and your ear. It’s a fun poem about having fun, though of course there’s more to it than that. The poem expresses the desire to hold on to a fleeting experience, to fix it in words and images before it’s washed away on the tide of time.
“Recuerdo,” in Spanish, can mean recollection or souvenir, which is kind of perfect. The speaker summons bits and pieces of a memorable night, organizing them into verses that bring those hours back to life, even though they’re gone forever. We pick up those verses, and — impossibly but also unmistakably — we’re right there with her, inhaling the sea-kissed morning air.
So here is the challenge: Memorize this poem! Why? Because it’s unforgettable.
Below, you’ll find a game designed to help you learn “Recuerdo.” Today your goal is to master that wonderful refrain. (Once you’ve done that, you’ll have one third of the poem.) As the Challenge continues through the week, we’ll look closely at how the poem is made, at what it’s about and at the extraordinary woman who wrote it. There will be new games and videos every day, until we disembark on Friday, poem in hand. Bon voyage!
Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Question 1/3
Let’s start with the refrain. Fill in the rhyming words.
We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank. Need help? Click “See Full Poem
& Readings” at the top of the page.
Monday
Learn a poem with us this week. Keep it for a lifetime.
Tuesday (Available tomorrow)
How rhythm and rhyme make a poem memorable.
Wednesday (Available Apr. 30)
This is a New York poem. After you learn it, you can take it anywhere.
Thursday (Available May 1)
This poem is about staying up all night. Use it to greet the day.
Friday (Available May 2)
We’ve learned a poem this week. Now it’s yours.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis, Nick Donofrio and Joumana Khatib. Additional editing by
Emily Eakin, Tina Jordan, Laura Thompson and Emma Lumeij. Design and development by Umi Syam and
Eden Weingart. Additional design by Victoria Pandeirada. Video production by Caroline Kim.
Additional video production by McKinnon de Kuyper. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg. Illustration
art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Hannah Robinson.
Audio of “Recuerdo” from “Edna St. Vincent Millay in Readings From Her Poems” (1941, RCA); accompanying
photograph from Associated Press.
Blundstone Boots
There was a point when I wore kitchen clogs, which I found uncomfortable. Then, Birkenstocks, but your heel’s exposed. Your sock’s going to get soaked, especially when you’re flooding the floors to clean at the end of the night. Blundstones are waterproof and they look good. I can go from the airplane to out in the wild, right into the kitchen and I feel like they fit all those scenarios.
Palo Santo
When I opened my restaurant in the Line hotel in Austin, it was in every single room. My wife had to tell me what it was because I was like, “What are these wooden sticks in here for?” I travel with it and when I’m in dressing rooms, studios and hotels, it just makes everything smell familiar to me, regardless of where I am.
Dental Hygiene
When I’m eating different flavors throughout the day — snacking on things or trying 15 dishes on “Top Chef” — at a certain point, my mouth starts to just feel gross. Brushing my teeth, tongue scraping and flossing help me reset a little bit.
Deep Pockets
A lot of women’s pants have little pockets that go down maybe three inches. I need them to touch my thigh. Because I’m not a purse kind of person, I like to fit my wallet, keys and mints all in my pocket if I can. I have a stylist for any clothes that I wear in public or on television. When fending for myself, I’m going to wear pants that are two times too big, comfortable and with deep pockets. Lululemon dance studio relaxed fit mid-rise cargo pants are so comfortable. Not only do they have deep pockets, they also have cargo and back pockets.
Carmex
My preference is the stick. I always carry it in my left pocket; that’s just where it lives. I don’t leave home without it and it’s stashed in random places in our house — on my desk, in the junk drawer downstairs, two in our bedroom. I buy them in bulk and take great pride in finishing them.
Peppermint Gum
My mom used to tell me, “You look like I look like a cow chewing gum.” But it keeps cadence and there’s something in the rhythm of chewing where if I’m doing a task, especially if I’m cooking for hours, it’s a place for the anxiety to go. You know, how people relax with knee bouncing.
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