On Aug. 15, on a practice field in Charlotte, Aaron Rodgers had one of his best moments of training camp. Only for this one, he wasn’t throwing or running. He didn’t even have a football, or so much as a film clicker, in his hand, either.
The New York Jets had just finished their joint practice with the Carolina Panthers, and his former teammate (and Rock Hill, S.C.’s own) Tori Gurley came over to catch up with him. Gurley was on the Packers’ practice squad in 2011 and stuck in Green Bay through camp in ’12. He was a receiver then, there for 13 months, and never caught a ball from Rodgers in a regular-season game.
Gurley had come over, in part, just to thank Rodgers, who had encouraged the receiver—as he struggled to find a place in the NFL—to keep thinking positively about himself. Gurley hung around the NFL a few more years, and played a couple of seasons in Canada after that.
Then, Gurley FaceTimed his wife and young son, T.J. Rodgers smiled recalling it.
“Tori is a name nobody remembers, but he was in Green Bay for a couple years, and he said something really special about a comment I made that, to me, wasn’t an earth-shattering comment, just an encouraging word to him that he said stuck with him,” Rodgers said, leaning back in his chair a few days later, inside the Jets’ fieldhouse. “Moments like that remind you how special these things are.
“I’ve said this to a lot of guys, and they’ll understand it when they’re 40, not in their mid-20s—20 years from now, you’re going to be talking about the pranks and the jokes and the road trips and inside jokes that you had. The locker room. You’re not going to be talking about the scores or the stats or whatever. If you win a Super Bowl, you’ll talk about that run, but it’s the relationships that make a difference.”
Rodgers is, in fact, 40 now.
He doesn’t have to be here, sitting in this chair, on a fall-like August day about a month into training camp. He’s made almost $350 million for playing football and however much else in ancillary income off the stardom the sport brings him. As his June trip to Egypt showed, and as he’s illustrated so vividly with his own words, he has interests outside of his place as a professional athlete.
So he could be anywhere he wants, on any terms he wants. Yet, he’s here, which might be what everyone is missing about the Aaron Rodgers story as it heads into its 20th season.
More than just that, after what he’s gone through the past 12 months, he couldn’t be happier to have his roller-coaster life parked right where it is, in Florham Park, N.J. It’s another shot, of course, at a second Super Bowl title, with a loaded team, 14 years after his first one. But just as much, it’s getting the chance to get on those tracks one more time, with guys who aren’t much different than Gurley was all those years ago, that has him as ready as he’s ever been.
NFL training camps are over, and we have one final Monday column for you before the season starts. In the takeaways this week, you’ll find …
• How Justin Fields may have delayed the Pittsburgh Steelers’ QB decision a bit.
• Why the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ team-building deserves your attention.
• Where the Denver Broncos saw Bo Nix in April and where they see him now.
And a whole lot more.
But we’re starting with Rodgers and his renewed, revised view of football, and what it’s come to mean to him after that really horrible Monday night in East Rutherford a year ago.
There was indeed a low point to Rodgers’s 2023 after he tore his Achilles on the fourth snap of his Jets career. It was physical. It was mental. It lasted for more than just a couple of days.
It wasn’t a single thing. It was everything.
“The low point was not just sitting in the training room at MetLife, after it happened,” he says. “It was flying home [to California] and then really the first 13 days not being mobile. It was hard. I had surgery out there with Dr. [Neal] ElAttrache. Having people take care of me, and I can’t really move, it’s a whole ordeal to just go to the bathroom and sleep. You’re in pain. I’m not a big pain med guy. There were definitely some low points.
“Then watching the team struggle was hard, knowing what we built through the offseason and training camp, when people got to see the energy and the enthusiasm through Hard Knocks. There was a lot of excitement around our squad. There were definitely some low moments there.”
How he broke from that funk explains, too, how that appreciation for what he has renewed.
After the procedure in Southern California, and the assisted trips to the bathroom and all those restless nights, he got back to Jersey and around his teammates. On one hand, he was dealing with what all athletes with serious injuries do—a helpless feeling where, no matter how much time you spend around the team, you can’t be a part of it in nearly the same way you were before. On the other, he was back in on the banter, and the lunches and dinners, and the relationships that he increasingly treasured.
At the same time, he was getting a very real look at what the next phase of his life will be like, when he can’t play football anymore, and all that comes with it is gone. There was plenty of good and plenty of bad.
“It felt like retirement,” Rodgers says. “It was a good [thing to feel], to sink into the fact that I’m away from the team, I’m not a player—even though I got credit for a win the first week, I had nothing to do with it. Having nothing to do with it gives you a whole new perspective. You really feel what life without the game feels like. It was a beautiful gift to be able to feel comfortable without the game.
“At the same time, when that sinks in, you tap into your energy and where your heart is toward the game. My heart was still wanting to play and wanting to compete. That was my focus with my rehab. How can I get back as quickly as possible? How can I rebuild my body? How can I avoid, as much as I can humanly do, something like this happening again? It just starts with that love of the game.”
And that love of the game was apparent when he showed he wasn’t satisfied to come back for the 2024 season. He was going to try to make it happen in ’23.
In late November, less than three months after popping the Achilles, he was back on the practice field. Three weeks later, with a 30–0 loss to the Miami Dolphins, the Jets were eliminated from the playoff race, and Rodgers conceded that his hustled effort to return to the game field on a historic timetable would go out the window with the team’s postseason hopes—neither he nor the team would put himself in harm’s way just to play out the string.
Still, the mere desire to try showed his passion for football still burned. So, too, did the circumstances under which he wanted to go.
“There would have been risk,” he says. “I wasn’t able to run.”
Had he come back, he says now, he’d have had to do what he once did coming back from another injury, playing exclusively from the pistol and shotgun.
“To me, it felt similar to the 2014 run. I popped my calf in Week 17 against the Lions, came back in the game in the second half, was very immobile, was in the shotgun, the pistol. We end up winning that game to get a bye. I did rehab for two weeks, was able to play against Dallas, reaggravated it in the first quarter of that game. Played in Seattle, NFC championship and couldn’t really move very well.”
Almost making the Super Bowl that year gave him confidence the same sort of adjustments could work in 2023. That led him to focus on moving within a very small box in practice, to try to simulate how playing on the injury would work.
Not getting the shot to at least try was disappointing for Rodgers. But he’d long since known he was coming back in 2024. So he knew he’d have another shot.
The reality is there was never any question that Rodgers was coming back, hard as returning from an Achilles injury can be, especially for a guy turning 40.
“Part of it is I didn't want to go out like that,” he says. “I want to go out on my feet. I think we all do. We never choose how we get to go out. The picture-perfect ending is going out holding the Lombardi. That rarely happens for people. There’s only been a couple guys. John Elway did it. Peyton Manning did it. Very few guys can do that. I didn’t want my last image to be me getting carted off the field. I knew what the undertaking would be to come back at 40 from a crazy injury like that. It starts with the love of the game.
“If I didn’t really love the game, it would have been an easy decision. I have all the other stuff taken care of. I got all the money I could possibly want. I feel good about what I’ve accomplished in my career and what we accomplished over the years in Green Bay. It just comes down to, I still love the game. I love practice. When that thing goes and it feels like a job, I’ll go. I still don’t feel like I’ve worked a day in my life.”
So, as difficult as the rehab was, looking back at it, Rodgers chose to focus on the relationships he built, with then Baltimore Ravens running back J.K. Dobbins (who had an Achilles tear of his own) and then New Orleans Saints guard Trai Turner (coming off a torn quad), who were both in California rehabbing with him. He got to see who was really there for him when football wasn’t.
And just like he got to feel what retirement would be like, he got to take stock of what the game itself meant to him and the place it held in his life.
“I was experiencing life without football,” he says. “There was a lot of beauty in that, in just enjoying those moments because I hadn’t been able to enjoy those things for so long. It gave me a different perspective. It gave me time to journal and think and meditate on why I love football, and have gratitude for how much it’s brought to my life. The friendships with players and coaches. The high moments. The heartbreak. It’s all part of a career I’m really thankful for.”
With that, came another change.
For years, Rodgers has pushed the nonfootball side of himself out into the public square. It manifested in his comments on the COVID-19 vaccine, after news of his own decision not to get vaccinated broke. After that, he used his platform, one that was only getting bigger after that decision, to comment on various social and political topics. He’s dated celebrities. He went on the darkness retreat.
Doing all that, of course, never meant he wasn’t prioritizing football. But getting caught up in it, at times, did equate to perhaps not fully appreciating what he had simply as a player.
“I was leaning into that so much, that I wanted so badly just to prove that I wasn’t just a football player,” he continues. “The slight perspective adjustment I had was to lean into the fact that I am a football player. It’s pretty cool. Look how much it’s given to my life. The majority of the best friends in my life are from this sport. I’m the godfather to Randall Cobb’s kid because he got drafted in Green Bay. We played together. We have a deep, close relationship.
“The money, that’s given me the opportunity and the platform—the opportunity to travel to places I want to travel to and meet the people I’ve met. I am so thankful that I am a football player, and that it has been my identity. And it’s by also realizing I’m not just on the back nine, I’m on the 18th tee right now and trying to finish.”
The good news, then, is he has the team around him to do it in a very big way.
Now, injury or no injury, Rodgers is really just carrying out the plan he’d set a year ago.
Last summer, he saw what was around him in camp and thought, “I can’t just do one year.” The Jets, in his view, were rolling. They’d be really good that fall. They’d be even better with another offseason. So retirement was removed from the proverbial table already.
This offseason’s moves only further confirmed Rodgers’s instinct on the team’s direction.
“When we signed Tyron [Smith], Morgan [Moses] and John [Simpson], and then we added Mike Williams, that’s when the excitement started to pick up,” he says. “We added four guys that have played a lot of football. It brings some veteran leadership to the locker room. It’s going to be a different feel. You just kind of knew it in OTAs, that we were a little bit different. That coincided with the amping up on the pressure to win now for all of us, Robert [Saleh] and [GM] Joe [Douglas], too.
“And, honestly, too much gets made of that, because if you look at the NFL the way it is, you’ve got to win every single year. If you have a down year, with the snap decisions by owners in this league, first-year coaches get fired all the time—you got to win now. Any team not looking at it like that is missing out on an opportunity. It’s best if you go all in.”
Rodgers then added, with emphasis, “That’s the mindset for us.”
This time around, Rodgers isn’t going to rail against that. You want to put the Jets in a pressure cooker? That’s fine, as the quarterback sees it. That’s been his life, anyway. And with his renewed perspective, he won’t even consider seeing it as a bad thing.
“I was on a team for 18 years where excellence was expected, not hoped for,” he continues. “I think there’s a lot of similarities here. It’s been a rough 13 years not making the playoffs, but they don’t just want a 9–8 team. Yay, we made the playoffs. They want to make the playoffs. They want to compete for a championship. We’re all on the hot seat. That’s how you should be. I said this to the media: Everybody should be.
“There should be pride in the performance. Every single year, my job is on the line. That’s how I looked at it, even when I became a starter, even when I was the highest-paid player multiple times. I got to go out and f---ing earn it, otherwise I’m going to be out of here, and they’re going to start looking for the next guy.”
So as Saleh and his staff have tried to put together an offseason that has far fewer bells and whistles than 2023 had leading into September, with an intense focus on football, with less of everything else allowed in, Rodgers has come to take all that for what it is.
Just before I talked to Rodgers, I was on with Dan Patrick, and he told me he’d love to know whether the quarterback feels like the Jets are covered fairly. I thought it was an interesting question. So I asked.
“With more popularity comes more scrutiny,” Rodgers says. “I think sports in general are overanalyzed, probably overcriticized. That’s a part of it now. It’s the part you don’t necessarily dream about doing when you’re a kid. And I think it's a good part of it because it really reveals a lot of character. I enjoy the New York media. They ask tough questions. They pry about certain things—great. I enjoy it.
“People think it’s so much different than Green Bay. I don’t know. I feel like Green Bay, there were certain people you knew were going to ask probing questions, stick on certain things, some people that liked you, some people that didn’t like you. I feel like it’s a fair media. … I understand the New York tie to it. It’s a big city. It’s not for everybody. I’ve enjoyed my time here, hope to be able to play the whole season. I think if I do, we’re going to have a real, real successful season.”
It’s been a year and a half since Rodgers made the decision to leave Green Bay and come to New York. With a lot of water now under that bridge, and time past, he has no regrets.
He views the call to come to Jets the same way now as he did in the spring of 2023.
“I feel great about it,” he says. “It’s meant a lot to me. It revamped my love for the game. I’m really thankful for that. I have a lot of pride in my performance, so last year was really disappointing and heartbreaking. I want to give these Jets fans a good feeling about my time here. I want to go out and play at a really elite level and give them a lot to cheer about. They deserve it. I’m really thankful for it.
“And it was time for all this. With the way Jordan [Love] played last year? He was obviously ready to play. There’ll be some coming together down the line [in Green Bay] when I’m done, and when Jordan’s still probably balling. I look forward to that. I’m really thankful for this chapter in my career.”
I then asked whether he’s thought about how his predecessor in Green Bay, Brett Favre, returned to Lambeau after a messy divorce—and how quickly everyone was able to move past the things that had happened in the interim, and how that’ll probably be him someday soon.
“Yeah, for sure,” Rodgers says. “I just don’t think there’s going to be a stop in Minnesota in between.”
For now, he’s focused on the season, and playing, and enjoying every minute of that.
The goal’s the same, to be in New Orleans in February playing for it all. But to be focused on that now would be, in Rodgers’s mind, to not get the most out of the here and now. So as to whether a win in the Super Bowl would mean walking away, he’s not even close to being there yet on a plan.
He wants to play two more years. Could that change? Sure. For now, though, it’s not something he’s thinking much about.
“I would have to see how I feel,” he says. “My first goal is to be healthy and to play all 17 regular-season games and then make a run. I’d have to think about that. A lot of guys don’t answer questions seriously when it comes to that stuff. Of course, that would be an amazing way to go out. I’m not saying that that would be my one-and-done. A lot happens during the year with the love of the game, the relationships formed, the way the team’s playing.
“I wanted to play two great seasons healthy with the team. If that happened, that would be a conversation to be had. But this team is set up to be good for a while. It would be fun to be a part of that, if I can still play and be healthy.”
Twenty years into an illustrious career, Rodgers is thankful just to have the perspective that playing for that long gives a quarterback. How he views the sport is different now. How he loves the sport is, too. That’s actually why he won’t speak in absolutes. He knows that when he walks away and it’s over, his life will change.
He’s looking forward to some of it. He does have thoughts about things outside of football, but is learning that he doesn’t need to share all of them. “I don’t have a fear around being canceled … But it’s figuring out what you actually give a f--- about. It’s picking my spots.” He has interests outside of the game, too, that he’ll be able to pursue. His life outside the NFL is, in fact, tattooed on him, with the astrological signs of his two godsons part of an infinity-eight design he had done on his inner bicep last October, during his rehab.
But in 2024, he’s still a football player. And he’s embracing that, if in a slightly different way than he used to.
“I would say 20 years ago, it was the competition, the ability to compete,” he says. “I always wanted to play sports in a position that had an impact on the game. Point guard touched the ball almost every possession. Soccer, it was forward or goalie, so you really had the impact on the game. When I was playing baseball, I wanted to pitch. Football is a no-doubter, it’s quarterback. I need to be in the action. All my favorite players were the impact players. Joe Montana, Steve Young, Michael Jordan, people that could make an impact on the game.
“It was the competition 20 years ago. Now, as a reflection, it’s the relationships. It’s these friendships that last longer. It’s the ability to have a time like we do at the Kentucky Derby every year and bring together 12 guys, where everybody’s played together at some point. There’s relationships. There’s friendships. We keep in touch.”
So it is that the Jets’ bye falls on the weekend of the Stanford–Cal game, when the 2004 team from Berkeley, perhaps the best team in school history, will have its 20-year reunion. Rodgers will be there to help celebrate all the success the Jeff Tedford–era Golden Bears had. Just as much, he’ll be there to reminisce on all the stuff he’s told his younger teammates that they’ll remember when football is long gone.
Rodgers was anticipating what that’ll be like, as we spoke, with excitement in his voice.
It’s one in a long list of things he has to look forward to over the next five or so months.
After last year, no one’s going to have to remind him to appreciate all of it.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Aaron Rodgers Opens Up About Rehabbing Injury, Returning for 2024, Being on ‘18th Tee’ of Career.
