It was a blustery Tuesday in the upper Midwest. NFC North fans huddled around their computer screens in anticipation of what could be potentially league-altering news.
A typically smug and enigmatic Aaron Rodgers plopped down on the couch wearing yet another T-shirt adorned with characters from The Office to join The Pat McAfee Show. An onslaught of twos in the day’s date was not going to prevent Rodgers from attending his own weekly holiday. He’s appropriately dubbed it “Aaron Rodgers Tuesdays,” a moniker whose catchiness comes solely from the featured name itself and no semblance of wordplay or poetic devices.
His appearance was rumored to be one where he divulges “big news.” You see, the media circus has started all over again.
Adam Schefter’s attempt at breaking this mystery wide open just a year ago is resurfacing. Eager little journalistic beavers are ready to extrapolate any action that Rodgers takes (or doesn’t take) to make bold proclamation regarding his future. Will he be going back to the Green Bay Packers? Will Rodgers take his talents to San Francisco? Or will he retire and go out on top with his second consecutive MVP?
The clamoring and gnashing of teeth is precisely what Rodgers wants. All of this is a desperate attempt to keep the spotlight focused squarely on him.
Which is exactly why he won’t retire.
I say this for one reason, a reason I cannot take full credit for concocting. But it is nonetheless the likeliest rationale for why Rodgers will continue playing for at least one more season.
If Rodgers retires this year, he will share his Hall of Fame enshrinement with Tom Brady.
It would be foolish not to think that Rodgers, a master manipulator playing the game of life like competitive chess, has not thought of this as a possibility. Brady’s excellence has overshadowed his entire career:
- Brady’s seven Super Bowl titles to his one
- Sustained regular-season success
- A model wife
- Great hairline
- Etc.
Rodgers can continue to preach about letting the outside noise go, but those who are the loudest about “finding their inner peace” have seldom done that.
The dog-and-pony show over the last season-plus has established Rodgers as a certified egomaniac. McAfee has given him a safe space to do exactly as he pleases, and he has taken that opportunity to divulge his insane (and completely unfounded) theories on the COVID-19 vaccine. He’s also voiced disdain for the “woke mob” as they work to “place the final nail in [his] cancel-culture coffin.”
In January, I wrote about Rodgers deserving that embarrassing and gutless loss to the San Francisco 49ers. Yesterday, on the McAfee show, Rodgers made a point to give a seemingly genuine apology for his comments on the COVID-19 vaccine:
For a guy who is so careful, intelligent, and calculated, it is inexcusable to make those dangerous comments in the first place. To say those things and then backtrack a few months later and claim — after professing the benefits of taking ivermectin (which you shouldn’t) (seriously, it’s for livestock) because his buddy Joe Rogan (who is also a terrible person) told him to do so — that Rodgers didn’t “want to be divisive” is an absolute joke.
Rodgers is and has always been looking out for him and himself alone. His teenager-who-just-got-dumped-by-his-first-girlfriend (Rodgers is 38 years old) Instagram post the other day was not about gratitude or “loved ones” or anything like that. It was an excuse to get back on the McAfee show to have something to talk about. It gave him an opportunity to gaslight his spectators, saying that he “obviously” didn’t mean anything by that post. He also said that he would divulge more clues as to what his decision will be at a future date.
The receipts for Rodgers’ selfishness go way back. Because of this, he will absolutely not retire this offseason. That decision is not contingent on whether he wins another Super Bowl. Instead, he will retire when he can be celebrated alone and not in the limelight of another generational QB whose career had more glory.
