Aaron Rodgers Just Showed All Quarterbacks How to Win a Power Struggle

The four-time MVP proved exactly how much teams should be willing to do to keep their stars happy, and everyone should take notice.

Aaron Rodgers’s pursuit of a favorable environment in Green Bay was one he took to its theatrical edge, not unlike Leonardo DiCaprio’s desire for an Oscar win that led him to be pummeled by a black bear in The Revenant.

He freed himself from the buttoned-up quarterback norm. He said everything—literally, everything—that came across his mind during a consequential and maddening time in U.S. history. He posted cryptic Instagram photos (before denying their cryptic nature). He called out the Packers’ organization in press conferences with their sponsor logos sitting idly in the background. He became both the disease and the cure, which forced his team to decide between a full-scale surgical removal or ultimate, unbridled acceptance. In vacillating between hero of all jaded employees and suspect Reddit Thanksgiving uncle, Rodgers was essentially forcing the Packers to make a plaster mold of his personalities, desires, preferences and talents for him to comfortably fall back into.

And he did. Even before news of his record-breaking contract leaked Tuesday—the one that will rightfully place him above Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen and Dak Prescott, the one that will almost surely get Jordan Love traded—Rodgers began to see the changes he desired enacted out of that reticent acceptance. The organization brought back his favorite position coach with no assurance that Rodgers would even sign. Behind the scenes at the combine, Packers execs were prepared to pay him whatever he wanted but also seemed wholly prepared for the entire thing to blow up on a whim if Rodgers decided to walk away. That is a special kind of Stockholm syndrome.

Mike De Sisti/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel/USA TODAY Network

Throughout this process, Rodgers accomplished a few bucket list items. He did what Brett Favre couldn’t do, establishing his value to the point where it was the understudy, not the entrenched MVP, who would have to go. He assured that his thoughts would matter, whether they were actually taken into account inside the Packers’ front office or if they’d simply be espoused on Pat McAfee’s show as a means to second-guess the employer who wouldn’t listen to him.

But mostly, he provided a modern blueprint for the next handful of quarterbacks angling for an extension. Not just ensuring that they would likely continue the trend of market-topping deals after a few years when players at the position started taking strange, below-market contracts, but that they would have to be accepted, wholly and completely. That they would have to be listened to. That they would be undermined no longer at the hands of some process that didn’t exclusively have their best interests in mind.

We don’t know whether Justin Herbert, Matthew Stafford or Joe Burrow has any burning desires to control their respective front offices, sign contracts that could afford them enough money to purchase and rule over a small Caribbean island chain or wade into media as active players religiously defending their own personal narrative. But now they can. They will be able to do so without so much as a sneeze from their employer because they, like Rodgers, have crossed a talent threshold that a franchise will stand on its head to accommodate.

Think about the incredible reality of what Rodgers accomplished. In an era of scheme-forward head coaches, the Packers have Matt LaFleur, who won 13 games in each of his first three seasons. They have a first-round pick at the quarterback position whom LaFleur could tutor. Theoretically, they were armed with absolutely everything they needed to walk away from Rodgers during the most fitful moments of this passive-aggressive power struggle.

What did they do instead?

This is real, concrete power. This is absolute power in a day in age when some seedy owners are so desperate for answers at the position that they’re willing to try to disgustingly force-settle very serious lawsuits in order to attain stability under center. Credit goes to Rodgers for feeling that out. For realizing that no one was going to tell him “no.” And for showing another generation of players just how valuable they are and how desperate those who employ them can get.

While some might say this isn’t behavior to be celebrated, think about how manipulative, controlling and coordinated ownership has become in NFL circles. Think about how many times players have been squeezed, locked out, shut up and buried just to maintain the current illusion of power.

Rodgers is an extreme example, but when you look around the NFL, his importance to the Packers is not unlike Herbert’s to the Chargers, Mahomes’s to the Chiefs, Allen’s to the Bills, Burrow’s to the Bengals or Stafford’s to the Rams. Everything would fall apart if they walked away, and the organizations must be willing to accommodate so much more, bending and contorting so much more than these players thought possible.

It’s time for them to start asking for the moon and the stars. For Saturn and a few of its rings, and demand that Pluto be reinstated its planethood just because they feel like it. Then, they can thank Rodgers for the ability to get what they wanted, when they wanted it and just because they wanted it.