From top to bottom, the New York Jets’ 2024 debut was a disaster. A 40-year-old Aaron Rodgers looked like a shell of himself. The San Francisco 49ers cut up the vaunted New York defense without much resistance.
And now, some are even questioning the toughness of one of the Jets’ best players, Ahmad “Sauce” Gardner.
Some time into the Monday Night Football broadcast, it was mentioned that Gardner had left the game, but … apparently not for any medical reason. NFL fans on Twitter eventually surmised that Gardner might have taken himself out after a hard tackle on the 49ers’ explosive Deebo Samuel. The assumption was that he didn’t want to do that specific job anymore.
Gardner would eventually return to the Jets’ defeat, but not before the cat was out of the bag. In a now-deleted post on Twitter, Gardner denied that he took himself out because he didn’t want to tackle Samuel again:
Sauce’s deleted MNF post talking about his absence in the 2nd quarter pic.twitter.com/i9kya52p1g
— B/R Gridiron (@brgridiron) September 10, 2024
Listen, there are a lot of fast-moving parts in NFL games these days.
Our hyper-fixation on getting instantaneous clarifying information as a society seldom means something nefarious or duplicitous is going on behind the scenes just because we haven’t heard anything more. Seriously, folks, NFL players get hurt and have valid undisclosed reasons for leaving games all the time. Much more than you think! We shouldn’t be quickly calling their character into question just because of a sick variation on the burden of proof ideal.
With that said, Gardner could’ve handled this better in public. Either don’t address the situation at all because you don’t owe fans talking about you on social media anything, and drawing attention to it makes it a thing, or say you had the wind knocked out of you (which is what likely happened). Throwing in the cry-laughing emoji into a deleted tweet of frustration makes it seem like Gardner really did leave the game because he didn’t want to tackle Samuel.
It’s a communication misstep that he could’ve avoided.
