This is “Grading Aaron Rodgers’ brother Jordan’s performance on The Bachelorette.” Here’s what’s happening: This season, Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers’ brother Jordan — who had a brief stint in the NFL and Canadian Football League himself — is a contestant on The Bachelorette. I will be tracking his progress and analyzing how he’s playing for as long as he can hang in there. I invite you to come along on this journey with me as Jordan tries to capture The Bachelorette equivalent of the Lombardi trophy: JoJo Fletcher’s heart.
ABC/Craig Sjodin
Welcome back! You’re about to embark on night two of this week’s marathon Bachelorette episode, which is maybe the cruelest thing ABC has ever done. I don’t know about you guys, but I find each show emotionally exhausting. They’re veritable roller coasters of highs and lows, ups and downs, twists and turns, and manipulative scene after manipulative scene thanks to the genius, maniacal, maybe-sociopath producers. Two in a row is is the mental equivalent of getting hit by a linebacker several times.
HOWEVER: True fans don’t dessert their teams in times of need, and neither do Bachelorette recappers who are oddly invested in how well Aaron Rodgers’ little brother performs. Last night our man didn’t get much screen time, so here’s hoping things are better this evening.
Pool party one-on-one time: B+
To quote Tommy Boy:
I was not expecting so much Jordan in the first quarter. Let me set the scene: We’re at a pool party with all the dudes and JoJo. JoJo takes her shirt off, so she’s just in her bikini top, and every man is checking her out, obviously (and I’m sitting here cringing like the New England Puritan that this show is establishing me to be). The guys are all goofing around — drinking, diving into the pool, and getting random bloody noses. The previews for this episode from last night made it seem like Chad was the cause, but Evan just hit his nose on the bottom of the pool or something.
And then the camera cuts to Jordan and JoJo making out on a bench.
They’re all over each other. Humans can’t be pretzels, but they are coming close. I can’t tell how it’s physically possible for one person’s leg to be wrapped around another person’s leg that many times, but hey, I’m not a doctor.
Things get intense quickly: JoJo’s worried that Jordan isn’t serious about her and that he’s too smooth. Not to brag, but I totally called this in my Week 1 recap. I had a feeling Jordan’s confidence could come back to bite him in some way. Perhaps JoJo’s sees it as Jordan being distant or too sure that he’s got her, and therefore doesn’t feel like he has to emotionally invest. At the same time, she’s clearly smitten (“I have that little girl kind of excitement when I think about Jordan”) and also appears to want to get him into bed as quickly as she can. I’m not sensing a similar vibe between her and any of the other guys right now.
Jordan realizes he’s going to have to open up. I’m not sure how he could’ve even been closed off at this point, seeing as they’ve had, oh, maybe three conversations over three weeks? But you can see the wheels turning in his head. He’s like, man, I have to say the right things the next chance I get. He tells the camera:
“It’s not that I don’t want to be vulnerable, but it takes time. I come off as if I’ve got it all figured out, but I don’t want her to think this doesn’t mean as much as it really does.”
Accepting the rose: A
Jordan obviously gets a rose at the rose ceremony. But right now I’m not paying attention because a) it’s so obvious that he’s going to get one and b) I’m trying to order takeout and can’t figure out how to add extra pita bread to my Seamless cart.
Leaving the mansion: A
So they leave the mansion forever, according to JoJo. Obviously Chad (the crazy one who eats yams like apples) got a rose, because there’s no WAY the producers were letting him go home and passing up on another hour and a half of his drama.
The whole motley crew goes to a resort in Pennsylvania, because everyone knows that’s the most romantic state. I think it’s Jordan who says, “we’re at this manly resort so I really feel comfortable.” I can’t be sure, though, because my food just got here, so I’m not looking at the screen.
Not Jordan but bear with me:
Luke and JoJo go on a one-on-one date to a wooden hot tub. I think Luke is going to be Jordan’s biggest problem. In Week 1, I said I thought Luke would win, which is a prediction I stand by. Things go well, and he “opens up” (which seem to be the magic words) in a way that Jordan has yet to do.
Worth noting that I’m a little upset right now because, judging from the previews, I thought that it was going to be Jordan and JoJo in the hot tub. But it turns out that the previews actually showed Luke and JoJo in the hot tub, and Luke and Jordan’s matching haircuts threw me off.
The style makes them both look a little bit like cockatoos.
Rhyne Piggott
Instagram/jrodgers11
Twitter/Luke__Pell
See? Understandable that in far away silhouette, you could mistake them for each other.
FOOTBALL DATE!!!!!!!!: A++++++++
I think that this is the season where ABC finally realized that if they hitch their wagon to the NFL horse, there’s a lot of money to be made. NFL players are getting into it (the Ravens host watch parties), and that’s basically free publicity and access to the widest fan base in America.
Football is Jordan’s bread and butter. When the guys and JoJo go to throw the ol’ pigskin around with Steelers players Ben Roethlisberger, Hines Ward, and Brett Keisel at Heinz Field in Pittsburgh, Jordan’s like oh, I GOT this (worth noting that Luke played football at West Point, but he’s not on this group date, so he doesn’t pose a threat right now). My current problem is that I’ve been using football metaphors for these recaps, and now they’re playing actual football, so it feels a little bit like Inception, where dream worlds meld together and you don’t know what’s real and what isn’t.
Jordan’s got a good arm. “The passes were coming hotter than they should’ve been,” he says, because he “played football professionally.” True on both counts, and the other dudes are having trouble catching his throws (no one shouts “Laces out, Dan!” which seems like a real missed opportunity). Jordan appears to be trying to murder the other men with his tackles. Roethlisberger is eating cheese puffs in the stands. I wonder if Aaron Rodgers and Roethlisberger are friends.
Sweet, guitar-playing James is bleeding from the head, and now he has a bandage on that makes him look like a soldier from World War I. He won’t get the stitches he needs because he’s determined to keep hanging out with JoJo.
Football game: A+
They play a game to see who gets to go to the cocktail party with JoJo that night — the losing team of five guys will have to go back to that weird, manly mountain resort and sulk by themselves. Jordan ends up being the quarterback for both teams, which doesn’t seem fair, but it’s a role he executes well (“I was dropping dimes out there”).
It’s really stupid that JoJo is just watching and cheering them on. She should’ve made herself the quarterback.
Ravens’ kicker Justin Tucker tweets this about the game:
Gotta show better ball security there. What if that ball was JoJo's heart? #TheBachelorette
— Justin Tucker (@jtuck9) June 8, 2016
Hines' viewing parties are not nearly as sick as @dennispitta's, guaranteed.
— Justin Tucker (@jtuck9) June 8, 2016
Group cocktail party: A+
This is Jordan’s time to shine, to be vulnerable, and to reassure JoJo that he’s there for “the right reasons” (which everyone keeps talking about and I’m pretty sure don’t exist), and he knows it. He does the whole soft, sensistive thing he did in Week 1 where he’s like:
“What’s on your mind?” he asks, staring into JoJo’s soul. She does her whole boring “I don’t know about you” schtick. There’s a moment where it looks like Jordan might fumble, but he saves it when he says all the things he has to say to stay on the show. Things along the lines of “I could see myself falling in love with you.”
Jordan gets the immunity rose (it’s definitely not called that, but now it is), which is like The Bachelorette equivalent of an EpiPen.
The two-on-one date: A+
Jordan does the most brilliant thing this episode, which is get Chad to threaten to come find him after the show is over and beat him up. Because when Alex and Chad go on a two-on-one date with JoJo into the woods (the theme of which is either Lord of the Flies or The Hatchet), Alex tells JoJo that Chad threatened Jordan. JoJo’s like, “Jordan!?” and gets super upset that anyone would want to harm him. She sends Chad home.
You guys. Jordan isn’t even on this date and he wins it.
Overall grade: A+
After a bad week last week and not enough screen time last night, Jordan Rodgers is back in the running for at least the AFC Championships, which in this case would be the episode where he brings JoJo home to meet his family. She is clearly so much more into him than she is into anyone else at this point.
But I’m not convinced that it’s going to last — I really think Jordan may turn out to be the classic bad boy who’s attractive because he’s slightly unavailable, but then ultimately not worth the uncertainty he causes. I will say that Jordan hasn’t yet proved himself to be that way, but I have a hunch.
Also:
I have completely reversed my position on Chad. I think he’s actually the most brilliant troll alive. Yesterday I was all upset because there was this weird undercurrent of violence that felt wildly inappropriate for a dating show, but tonight it became so clear that Chad knows exactly what he’s doing. Did you see him run his hands down the glass and smirk? Did you hear him tell Alex to drink milk? Chad is the only who actually gets that the show is total baloney. He cares so little about winning over JoJo that he can just mess with all the other guys and completely undercut anyone who thinks there’s legitimacy to this whole thing.
Chad is a performance artist. He’s the Shia LaBeouf of The Bachelorette. I wish he didn’t get kicked off because he’d probably show up to the next rose ceremony like this:
AP Photo/Axel Schmidt
Also, Chad’s Instagram is really something.
Anyway. I’m sad to report that next week is a bye week, meaning there is no show, so we’ll have to meet here again two weeks from now. I’ll see you then, and in the meantime, go Team Rodgers.
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