After one season and four additional snaps, the Aaron Rodgers experiment with the New York Jets is officially over. Now, the future Hall of Famer will face his old side in the first game of the season as his Pittsburgh Steelers travel to New York for a 1 p.m. ET clash. Last season’s brief Pittsburgh starter, Justin Fields, will be the starter for the Jets.
It’s doubtful that Rodgers will score the game’s first touchdown; though he was fairly mobile in his prime, he hasn’t recorded a rushing touchdown since the 2022 season, his final campaign with the Green Bay Packers. Thus, if not Rodgers (+4000), who will find paydirt first?
Let’s break down the odds at DraftKings Sportsbook.
Steelers at Jets First Touchdown Scorer Prop Bets
Justin Fields First Touchdown Scorer (+800)
Fields is one of the league’s better running quarterbacks, leading the league with 7.1 yards per carry in 2022, and while he took somewhat of a step back in 2023, he played well enough last season in six games with the Steelers to earn himself a starting role in New York this season. After a slow start, he recorded rushing scores in three of his last four games. Each was Pittsburgh’s first touchdown of the game, though not the game’s first.
He won’t necessarily have it easy; the Steelers finished eighth in overall run defense at Pro Football Focus, allowing the fourth-fewest rushing yards and tying for the eighth-fewest rushing scores to the position, which is impressive given that they had to play Lamar Jackson twice. Rodgers, unsurprisingly, didn’t factor into the Jets’ red zone strategy in 2024. But with new head coach Aaron Glenn and offensive coordinator Tanner Engstrand in the building, it’s tough to predict exactly what this season’s attack will look like. It’s worth noting that last season, Breece Hall (+700) scored just three rushing touchdowns within the red zone.
Kaleb Johnson First Touchdown Scorer (+1100)
Pittsburgh is another team that went through a lot of roster turnover in the offseason, as both the top red-zone rushing target (Najee Harris) and the top red-zone receiving target (George Pickens) now play for different teams, and both of the quarterbacks have been replaced by Rodgers. But Jaylen Warren (+700) wasn’t a major factor in the red zone for the Steelers last season, in part because he was trapped behind Harris on the depth chart and in part because, at five-foot-eight, he doesn’t have the size to be a major threat in short-yardage, halfback dive situations.
Though I generally prefer Warren to Johnson from a fantasy perspective, thanks to Pittsburgh’s win-now approach and play-calling conservatism, the six-foot-one, 224-pound Johnson might get more play in short-yardage situations near the goal line. In college at Iowa, he broke tackles fairly consistently, scoring a Hawkeyes-record 21 rushing touchdowns in his senior season, and he seemed to improve with each passing game in the preseason. Johnson won’t be trusted as an every-down back, but if there’s a situation for Mike Tomlin to test him out, it’ll be on a first and goal from inside the five-yard line.
