No, a decision on David Bakhtiari hasn’t been made (yet)

An aggregator on social media jumped the gun, stating that report claimed that Bakhtiari was set to be released this offseason.

On Thursday, The Athletic’s Matt Schneidman wrote an article titled “What will the Packers do at left tackle this offseason to protect Jordan Love?” Obviously, it touched on the upcoming decision that Green Bay will have to make about their franchise left tackle David Bakhtiari, who is coming off a surgery to repair his knee cartilage that has kept him off the field for most games since his 2020 ACL tear.

This part of Schneidman’s article was blown out of proportion on social media since the piece went live:

The Packers will assuredly trade or release Bakhtiari — maybe the New York Jets fork over a late-round pick to reunite Bakhtiari with his old golf cart buddy Aaron Rodgers, and that’s not a joke — despite the possibility that he’s still elite when healthy, as he showed for a brief Sunday against the Chicago Bears in September.

As Schneidman has since stated on X/Twitter, this was him “reading between the lines” and not “a report based on sourcing.” He was simply connecting the dots, as Bakhtiari is currently slated to command a $40 million cap hit in 2024. To put that into perspective, that figure would be the highest cap charge any NFL team has ever taken for a non-quarterback in a single season — if the Packers ride it out with Bakhtiari.

This didn’t stop some aggregators from running with Schneidman’s opinion as a fact, though, with one particular guilty party being Dov Kleiman — who has 266 thousand followers on Twitter/X.

Bakhtiari has even joined in on the fun at Kleiman’s expense, claiming that he was going to blame Schneidman if he gets “fired.”

From the outside looking in, either Kleiman has a poor understanding of the English language or he was just looking to stir the pot for social media attention. Still, the Tweet that Kleiman sent out has reached around a half-million people, just the latest example of how misinformation can spread like wildfire on the internet.

One part of his Tweet that is rooted in truth, though, is that the New York Jets might be interested in Bakhtiari’s services. In a long-form article by Zack Rosenblatt and Dianna Russini last month, The Athletic reported that Bakhtiari was on former Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers’ shortlist of potential Jets last offseason. Bakhtiari and Rodgers are known to be close friends, and Rodgers had a lot of success with Bakhtiari blocking his blindside, so this was a less-than-shocking development.

Maybe Bakhtiari does end up being a Jet in the future. In the present, though, he’s under contract with the Packers. Don’t expect the team to turn Bakhtiari loose until at least mid-March when Bakhtiari’s $9.5 million roster bonus is set to trigger for the 2024 season. The waiting game has been long, as far as Bakhtiari’s future is concerned, but we’re still a month removed from any significant deadline.