Joe Douglas
Kirby Lee | USA TODAY Sports

It is currently Aaron Rodgers Tick-Tock Season, with a slew of reported stories about how the deal that sent the future Hall of Fame quarterback from the Packers to the Jets went down being published.

ESPN joined the crowd Wednesday. And its piece includes this interesting nugget: The deal took so long to happen — according to the Packers, at least — because Jets general manager Joe Douglas ghosted them for a few weeks for whatever reason.

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From the report:

Talks intensified between (Packers GM Brian) Gutekunst and Douglas in Phoenix (at the NFL owners meeting), and a team source said the Packers contingent “walked away thinking they were pretty close to a deal if they didn’t have one already.” The Jets were “very optimistic,” Douglas told reporters.

Then Gutekunst didn’t hear from Douglas for two weeks.

“It was really weird s—,” a source with direct knowledge of the negotiations said. “This should have been done in three or four days once talks started because [the final trade compensation] wasn’t that far off from where it started.”

None of this matters now that the deal is done. But in hindsight, the Jets really spent too much time reading “The Art of the Deal” or something like that. They never had the leverage they believed they did, and that bears out in the fact the deal they consummated was — according to the report — basically the same deal they could have had weeks earlier. But that is OK, of course, because they got Rodgers in the end. But still, way to waste two weeks of our time.

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James Kratch can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @jameskratch.

James Kratch is the managing editor of ESNY. He previously worked as a Rutgers and Giants (and Mike Francesa) beat reporter for NJ Advance Media.