Much of this oddball activity and commentary has taken place on The Pat McAfee Show, where Rodgers appears for “Aaron Rodgers Tuesdays.” Disney reportedly paid $85 million for a licensing deal to air the daily sports talk show on ESPN, which it owns.
The Pat McAfee Show was the setting of the latest “Aaron Rodgers said what now?”incident, when on January 2 he basically implied that ABC late-night talk show host — and also a high-paid Disney employee — Jimmy Kimmel is a pedophile. It’s been a whole thing, with back-and-forth between Rodgers and Kimmel and ESPN and Disney, for days. Kimmel called Rodgers a “hamster-brained man” and threatened to sue him. An ESPN exec called Rodgers’ comments “dumb.” Rodgers refused to say sorry and responded that the exec’s comments weren’t “helping.” None of it was.
On Wednesday, January 10, McAfee said that Rodgers was off the show for the rest of the NFL season, explaining that the controversy around it all was just too much. Was Rodgers back on the show the very next day to talk about outgoing Patriots coach Bill Belichick? He was. He called in from the woods.
Rodgers is an avatar for a certain slice of the current culture wars. He’s one of those types of guys who’s maybe a little too online, is doing a little bit too much of his “own research,” and is becoming extra out there in his opinions — and defensive if anyone disagrees or takes offense. He’s not the only type of this guy. See: Elon Musk, Bill Ackman, Joe Rogan.
Still, like those guys, Rodgers is an enigma. He is excellent at football. He is also an eccentric guy with some bad opinions. The ego and the football genius that make him such a sports star do not always help him navigate society, at least in the way that many people find to be acceptable. He may be the smartest guy on the football field, but he’s not the smartest guy in every room he walks into, though he seems to feel that way. (That being said, he did win Celebrity Jeopardy! in 2015.)
As they used to say in Green Bay, Rodgers is “a complicated fella”
“As we’ve kind of learned, especially in the Trump era and even before the Trump era, any time an NFL quarterback steps out of their lane, especially into really, really wacky stuff … it’s quite, first of all, dangerous, because people listen to them, but also annoying,” said Mark Leibovich, the author of Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Timesand a staff writer at the Atlantic.
As they used to say in Green Bay, Rodgers is “a complicated fella.”
If you are not a football fan, listen, Aaron Rodgers is really good
Before we get to whatever Rodgers’s whole deal is personality- or opinion-wise, we should get this out of the way: he is a phenomenal football player and incredible quarterback. I am biased here; also, I am right.
“He is and will rightfully be in the conversation of one of the greatest quarterbacks who’s ever played the game,” said Kavitha Davidson, a sports writer who has worked at ESPN. “His situational awareness is wild.”
It wasn’t always clear things were going to work out this way for Rodgers. As Mina Kimes described in a 2017 ESPN profile of Rodgers that paints a quite different picture of the future Hall of Famer, his biography is “a long list of slights.” He got to be a good quarterback in high school, but Division I schools didn’t want him, so he played at a junior college near where he grew up in California for a year before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley. He excelled at Cal and seemed on track to be a top draft pick in 2005, but then he wound up being picked 24th by the Green Bay Packers. There, he watched former star Packers quarterback (and more problematic guy) Brett Favre play for a few years. He took over as starter in 2008.
With the Packers, Rodgers won the Super Bowl in 2011. He is a four-time MVP and was named to the NFL’s 2010s all-decade team, among other accolades. Of his generation, he’s up there with Tom Brady and Peyton Manning (and, for a long time, was seen as more benign and innocuous than both, especially Brady). His public image was, for much of his career, quite charming.
Rodgers didn’t apologize, but he did offer up a strange but fairly accurate self-assessment. “I’m not a super political person, okay? Do whatever you want. Conspiracy theorist? That’s fine, because if you look at the track record of conspiracy theorists in the last few years, they’ve been wrong about a lot of things,” he said. And then he complained about the media and cancel culture and said he does not “give a shit” about what people say about him, which … sure.
Finally, on Wednesday, January 10, McAfee said that Aaron Rodgers would no longer be appearing on his show for the rest of the NFL season. He said the show was “very lucky” to get a chance to talk to Rodgers and that he’s obviously a “massive piece of the NFL story” and acknowledged “some of his thoughts and opinions … do piss off a lot of people.” McAfee sounded relieved to be away from the drama. “I’m pumped that that is no longer going to be every single Wednesday of my life, which it has been for the last few weeks of my life,” he said.
As mentioned, Rodgers did appear on the show the very next day to talk about Belichick, the explanation being that he was the last person the outgoing Patriots coach talked to on the football field. In a tweet on Wednesday, McAfee had said that Rodgers would make “random surprise welcomed pop ins during big events or offseason adventures.” Belichick’s breakup with the Patriots is, indeed, a big event, but you have to admit the timing is funny.
An ESPN rep declined to comment for this story.
Aaron Rodgers is kind of unexplainable, and whatever the case, he’s not going anywhere
For someone who is a passive football fan, I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about Aaron Rodgers. And I guess that where I land often is that he’s a weird guy — sometimes in a way that’s harmless, sometimes in a way that’s offensive, and sometimes in a way that’s dangerous.
Rodgers is also overly sensitive and touchy. In 2012, he complained about a 60 Minutes profile of him, saying that he felt the editing of the piece “could have been done in a way that was maybe a lot more respectful of myself.” One part of the piece showed a fan telling Rodgers, who is 6’2”, that he thought he’d be taller, and Rodgers replying, “I don’t appreciate that.”
Mosqueda, from Acme Packing Company, told me that what specifically seemed to irk Rodgers in the latest Kimmel fight was that the comic made fun of him for going to junior college and not graduating from college. “He’s mentioned before that college professors at California treated him differently because he was an athlete, and he resented them for that,” he said.