It was about relationships last year, and it’s about relationships this year.
Aaron Rodgers wasn’t in a great place with the Packers coming out of the 2020 season, and an upset loss to the 49ers in the NFC title game, so much so that the Green Bay brass spent weeks unable to get ahold of its quarterback. There was the bungling of the communication on the Jordan Love pick. There was awkwardness of a draft-day news drop of a trade demand a year later. There was president Mark Murphy calling Rodgers a “complicated fella.”
And even Rodgers’s reentry to the organization, at the outset of training camp, was wonky, with his airing-of-grievances press conference and insistence that Randall Cobb be acquired as part of his return to Green Bay.
The funny thing is, seven months later, the earmarks of that dispute foretold everything.
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Rodgers spent this past weekend officiating his buddy David Bakhtiari’s wedding. Cobb was there and Matt LaFleur was, too—and that served as the perfect precursor to a decision for Rodgers that, in some ways, came down to those ties that bind the quarterback to the only organization he’s ever played for.
Let’s start with the relationships that were never in a bad place, those between Rodgers and his teammates, and between Rodgers and the current Green Bay staff. Rodgers has always loved the guys he played with, evidenced by how close he is with longtime Packers such as Bakhtiari and Cobb, and fellow wedding attendees A.J. Hawk and Clay Matthews III. All the same, his relationship with LaFleur has been pretty steady all the way through.
In fact, that last relationship with his coach wound up being the key to keeping all of this together, with the coach having maintained his bond with the quarterback even through all the tumult of last year. Which is why, in a quiet moment, on the second day of training camp, LaFleur remained optimistic that Rodgers wouldn’t necessarily be eyeing the door when the clock showed zeros on the 2021 season.
And this is important, too—above all else, you could hear how badly LaFleur wanted to keep coaching him.
“I mean, the guy’s, in my eyes, the greatest to do ever do it. So yeah, why wouldn’t you want to?” LaFleur told me that night at Lambeau Field. “I think he’s still got a lot left in the tank. I see it every day. He has so much fun out there, too, just competing. The ball’s still jumping out of his hand so damn effortlessly. So yeah, if he were to have retired, I would’ve put it in the same category as how I felt growing up in Michigan.
“I didn’t really grow up a huge professional football fan, but yeah, it was fun watching the Detroit Lions and Barry Sanders. And when [Sanders] walked away? That was heartbreaking. I know, from my perspective, it just wouldn’t be good for the game of football. And I do believe—I know—that there’s a lot of history here, and a lot that he loves about this place. And hopefully we can continue to work and come together, and fix whatever issues there might be.”
Which brings you back to the issues that were there. Though Rodgers held no ill will against Love, having been through a rocky start to his career alongside Brett Favre, he didn’t like the handling of Love’s selection—he was not told the Utah State prospect would be the pick until the Packers were on the clock—and didn’t like that Murphy and GM Brian Gutekunst hadn’t involved him more in big-picture decision-making. So that’s why when the Packers’ front office tried to change that, and did so last winter, Rodgers more or less ghosted them.
Since then, Gutekunst and Murphy have worked hard to repair their respective relationships with Rodgers and, as you might imagine, that went a very long way. So, too, did the fact that Rodgers, I was told over the weekend, felt like his relationships in the locker room (again, which have always been strong) were as good as they’ve ever been this year.
Now, I’m not naive to the business part of this. The Packers and Rodgers have discussed a four-year extension that’ll likely be finalized now as a part of this, and money’s not a nonfactor in any of these sorts of things, no matter what people try to tell you. I also believe that the Packers’ willingness to take on a Buccaneers–style build, in which they restructure contract after contract, mortgaging deals in order to keep a core in place, was important, too. Rodgers wanted the Packers to work on his timeline, and now they are.
But in the end, none of that matters if the relationships that Rodgers wanted to have with the people he works with, all of them, weren’t where they needed to be.
With one tweet from Pat McAfee on Tuesday morning, we got affirmation.
They are.
