Aaron Rodgers Never Belonged Anywhere Other Than Green Bay

The MVP quarterback would’ve had a long list of suitors if he had chosen to leave the Packers, but no other team would’ve been as good of a fit.

Aaron Rodgers belongs in Green Bay, and not just because the Packers give him the best chance to win a Super Bowl or could pay him more than any player has ever made per season. Rodgers belongs in Green Bay because it’s the NFL’s smallest market, full of loyal fans who have been emotionally invested in him for a generation. Rodgers could play great anywhere, but nobody will roll with his perplexing vax-truther, paranoid, sometimes petty existence like Green Bay.

This matters because if Rodgers has proven two things in his NFL career, it is that he is a savant at avoiding interceptions and an expert at noticing criticism. He does not let things go. He keeps track of every slight. If he went to Denver and struggled a little, or flamed out in another playoff game, and people started comparing him unfavorably (and even unfairly) to John Elway and Peyton Manning, Rodgers might actually respond, and his relationship with the city could deteriorate. If he went to Washington, he would be expected, implicitly, to fix the relationship between an awful owner and a frustrated fan base, and that’s not a good fit for Rodgers. If he went to Philadelphia … well, that would be some kind of social experiment.

Maybe Rodgers would have been O.K. elsewhere. But Green Bay is best for him. The 2021 season confirmed it. Rodgers misled the public about his vaccination status, bristled at the blowback, and mocked and went after reporters who questioned him. Then he lost another home playoff game to a lesser team. This all would have caused him more problems in a larger, more aggressive market. Green Bay was mostly just happy it had the MVP. (That is not a shot at Green Bay. Fans should be happy they have the MVP.)

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Rodgers is the rare sure Hall of Famer who has reason to believe he is unappreciated. He was left off the NFL’s 100th-anniversary team. It has become vogue to use Rodgers’s playoff failures as an indictment of him. He has won (and played in) just one Super Bowl. But let’s have some perspective: Brett Favre won one Super Bowl. He played in two. Peyton Manning won one Super Bowl in 13 years in Indianapolis. Drew Brees played in one and won it. Rodgers’s failure to win a second Super Bowl mostly just proves winning the Super Bowl is hard.

When Rodgers walked out of Lambeau Field after losing to the 49ers in January, he did so knowing, as everybody in that town did, that he had already won a Super Bowl with the Packers. That gives him emotional capital he would not have anywhere else. Rodgers will never have it better than he has it in Green Bay. No other citizenry would adore him so much. No other fan base would be as accepting of his sensitive nature. Pretty much every other media market would rough him up more than the Green Bay media does.

The Packers, of course, were never going to find a better quarterback than Rodgers. That is why this whole saga never should have happened. General manager Brian Gutekunst has done a terrific job with the Packers, but he also botched the Jordan Love pick to a degree that is hard to comprehend. Gutekunst traded first- and fourth-round picks for a quarterback who was never going to play for his team—and didn’t even give his franchise quarterback a heads-up.

Any rationalization for this pick just sounds silly. Rodgers was on the decline? He had thrown 51 touchdown passes and six interceptions in the previous two seasons. Rodgers needed the motivation of Love’s presence? If the only way you can fire up your Hall of Fame quarterback is to spend a first-round pick on a guy who won’t play, you are the worst motivator of all time.

Picking Love (and not warning Rodgers) came with other costs. Yes, the Packers managed to salvage their relationship with Rodgers. But first they had to adjust his contract last summer to get him to show up to camp, giving him leverage this winter, and then this year he just used that leverage. The best teams do a “we love you, you like us, we’ll work together to make sure you get paid a ton and we stay out of salary-cap hell” dance with their star quarterbacks. The Packers blew any chance of that. We will see whether they managed to finesse their way out of it when Rodgers signs his new contract.

There are more disastrous picks than Love—the Titans drafted Isaiah Wilson two picks later and he played four snaps for them—but it’s rare to find one that was so obviously a mistake from the start.

The Packers didn’t need Jordan Love. They had Aaron Rodgers. Rodgers didn’t need Denver or any other city. He belongs in Green Bay. This was a long road that turned into a circle, leaving Rodgers right where he started, right where he always belonged.