by For reasons only apparent to former Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers, he recently went on the record with TheAthletic.com for another broadcast of Green Bay grievances.
Among other things, Rodgers clings to the clumsy idea that his failure to respond to attempts to reach him wasn’t intentional.
Yes, he sticks to the “poor mobile coverage” cover story.
“I have zero or one bar in the house, so call me — sometimes it goes on, most of the time it cuts out and doesn’t go on,” Rodgers told Matt Schneidman. “Anyone who knows me, when I’m out west, they know they can get a hold of me. So you can say what you want about that, but that’s the damn truth.”
Through his final comments, Rodgers has deftly pivoted to a new story about his final days with the Packers. He stopped claiming they wanted him back and all of a sudden didn’t and claimed they decided to move on simply because they couldn’t get in touch with him.
“Did Brian text me more than I texted him?” Rodgers told Schneidman. “Yeah, but did I ghost him? No. I texted him back. There was back and forth we had and so this is the story you want to go with? You’re going to stand on this mound of sobriety and say that you’re probably going to say in the conversation of the best player in your franchise history that I couldn’t get a hold of him and that’s why we had to move on?
“Like, come on, man. Just tell the truth, you wanted to move on. You didn’t like that we didn’t communicate all the time. Like, listen, I talk to the people I like.
That’s certainly not how this issue got into the discussion of why Rodgers left the Packers. In March, Rodgers tried to sell the story that as the 2022 season ended, the Packers told him they wanted him to stay with the team and that after coming out of his retreat into darkness, he heard out of the blue that they had done that. shopped him.
Packers general manager Brian Gutekunst later bounced back to the idea that the team simply ignored Rodgers when making plans for 2023. Gutekunst said the Packers tried “many times” to contact Rodgers and Gutekunst had to do it after he failed to respond to them. his work.
The next salvo came from Rodgers, who trotted out the no-bars story during his preliminary press conference with the Jets.
Again, it all started because Rodgers originally wanted people to believe that: (1) the Packers left a light on for him; (2) he entered the darkness retreat “90 percent” leaning toward retirement; and (3) he first learned after emerging from the darkness that the Packers had shopped him.
It doesn’t hold up, for reasons unrelated to phone calls and footlockers. It doesn’t hold up because the idea that Rodgers went into the darkness believing that all was well with the Packers isn’t factually accurate.
That wrinkle actually came about when Rodgers first told his “Packers wanted me until they didn’t” story, during a March 15 performance with Pat McAfee. After painting the picture of utopia before darkness and dystopia after darkness, Rodgers admitted that he sensed things weren’t right during the 2022 season. That goes against his own version of how it all ended.
In the more recent comments to Schneidman, Rodgers further undermined his own story. “Before going into the darkness, I hit ’em and said, ‘Hey, there’s some swirling around here. We should get together, you, me and Matt [LaFleur].’”
So Rodgers was not blinded after deliberately blinding himself for several days. He knew things weren’t going well, and he wasn’t making it better by being aloof and aloof.
This all started as an attempt by Rodgers to make himself a victim of a Green Bay switcheroo. When gaps appeared in his first story, he hurried to plug them. With the original attempt having failed, the victimization attempt has turned into complaints about the Packers standing on a “hill of sobriety” by claiming they decided to trade the greatest player in franchise history simply because they couldn’t get in touch with him.
The truth is, the Packers wanted to move on and Rodgers wanted to move on. The idea that his desire to defect to the Jets only came about after the Packers tricked him about their desire to keep him just doesn’t survive the simplest amount of analysis and scrutiny. Especially since he has repeatedly contradicted himself on that point.
So why does he keep talking about it? Why did he allow an on-the-record interview where he unloaded his former team?
When Brett Favre left, all he wanted to do was kick his old team in the butt a few times. Rodgers seems to want to poison the well to the point where he finally gets his wish to fire Gutekunst.
Consider this line from Rodgers: “Like, listen, I talk to the people I like.”
Those 10 words really say it all, in more than 10 different ways.
In creating his Green Bay exit story, Aaron Rodgers outsmarted himself, originally appeared on Pro Football Talk
