Maybe this is just one person seeing what he wants to see. Maybe this is the networks and the league coalescing around a social media strategy hellbent on exclusively pumping positive content of Aaron Rodgers hugging people from his past. But I left Sunday’s Steelers meltdown, a 35–25 loss to the Packers, with a strange peacefulness regarding Aaron Rodgers that I’ve not felt—and, I wonder if he has not felt—in almost half a decade. Certainly, the same can be said about the team that let him go three seasons ago and the quarterback who replaced him and set an absurd franchise record for consecutive completions in his first matchup against his former teammate.
You normally hate those people who insist that life has a tendency of working out—clearly born before the advent of A.I.—but in this specific case, it has. Before our eyes, we’re getting the chance to see a fitting, non-embarrassing, socially digestible career finale for one of the game’s all-time great players, which, I’ll insist, could not have happened anywhere else. Especially in Green Bay. I believe it was Tom Brady Sr. who once wisely said that there’s no way for it to end well. But Rodgers seems to be challenging that narrative, even on an imperfect Pittsburgh roster that, by the week, is showing its deleterious levels of maturity and lack of team speed, but will still inevitably hold on for a bow-out playoff game.
