For love and football
With clean bill of health, Rodgers touched by outpouring of concern
FOR SO many of them, it’s a nomadic life, spent in the shadows of high-priced head coaches, tethered to a pressurized football dream that can be addictive, and rewarding if you win, or at the very least if you help boys grow into men if you don’t.
Sometimes it takes a serious health scare to make a football lifer like Kacy Rodgers understand what he means to the men he has touched over the years, from his playing days at the University of Tennessee and the CFL Shreveport Pirates, to a coaching career at Tennessee-Martin to Northeast Louisiana to Middle Tennessee State to Arkansas to the Cowboys to the Dolphins to the Jets, where he’s the defensive coordinator under Todd Bowles.
“Sometimes,” Kacy Rodgers said Thursday, “you take for granted what it is to be around the guys and be with ’em every day and the kind of family unit that it becomes.”
And sometimes, it takes the harrowing news that something terribly bad might be happening to someone so terribly good and so terribly young at 49 to let you know how much you are appreciated, if not loved. “Between these guys, former coaches that I coached with, this and that, it’s just kinda strange when I’m looking down at my phone, I’m getting texts from guys that I know are in the locker room getting ready for another game, reaching out: ‘We just heard about you, we’re praying for you,’ this and that. And it was just really touching,” Rodgers said.
“I’ve been coaching now for 26 years. So my numerous, numerous texts and everybody reaching out and these guys here, I know they gotta concentrate on the game but thinking about me, it was truly touching.”
It has been business as usual this week for Rodgers, and he may be back calling plays in the booth against Kirk Cousins and the Vikings on Sunday after two weeks of Bowles assuming those duties. He did not want to reveal the nature of the scare that rocked his and the Jets’ world.
“I had to have a procedure, and it was kinda bothering me, and it was something that we had to get checked out,” Rodgers said. “Then I got the results back this Monday and everything came back good, so we’re good to go.”
The Jets won one for Rodgers against the Broncos and then they won another one for him and for themselves against the Colts, and they are still trying to win another one for him and for themselves.
“Because that’s our brother,” Morris Claiborne told The Post. “We love him. He’s put that on our hearts, so whatever his problem is, he’s put it on all us, we’ve all taken that problem, so in his name we play as well.”
Rodgers is Bowles’ selfless sidekick, and when you ask him about the players playing for him, his answer reveals everything about the essence of the man:
“That’s priceless. One, from my standpoint, you never want to be a distraction to the team. I knew everybody else was having to pick up, Todd had to do more, the rest of the assistants had to do more, but then for the players to know they got a job to do, I feel like I’m hindering them to know they were thinking about me while they were trying to do their jobs really means a lot.”
It was torture for him watching Jets-Broncos from afar.
“The hardest thing for me was really maybe Denver, ’cause I was home sitting there watching them play, and the first time you’re sitting there on a couch watching the guys go play, that’s kind of a hard, hard feeling,” Rodgers said.
He sat with headphones on in the booth last Sunday and stayed out of the way. His surprise appearance in the pregame locker room buoyed players on both sides of the ball.
Claiborne: “He’s a great father figure.”
Darron Lee: “He’s like an uncle, honestly. He’s a stand-up guy and he cares, cares about his players, I know that for sure.”
Steve McLendon: “He’s just one of them guys that you always want around. He’s one of those coaches that you always want around, ’cause you know you can learn something.”
Rodgers and his wife, Marcella, have a son, Kacy Rodgers II.
“We stayed positive the whole way, and we just felt like everything was gonna come out OK, and then we got the news we wanted,” Rodgers said.
The news everyone wanted.