How the 49ers can Get Aaron Rodgers

As I was saying.

As I was saying.

The 49ers almost certainly will have an opportunity to get Aaron Rodgers this offseason. And they should get him.

After the Packers lost to Buccaneers in the NFC Championship on Sunday, Rodgers wouldn't say where he will play next season.

"He sounded like a guy who was preparing to walk away from Green Bay," ESPN's Adam Schefter said. "Now, it was right after the game, so it was a highly emotional time. It's a long, trying season for everybody. And clearly Aaron Rodgers, as he himself said, wants to step back and take some time to make a decision. 

"Let's just break this down. He himself said last week that his future was a beautiful mystery. Those were the words he used -- a beautiful mystery. We know that he was not particularly enthralled with the team's selection of Jordan Love (in Round 1). We know that he's at the point of his career where clearly he's frustrated with these playoff defeats.

"Now, again, let's get ahead of ourselves. He's under contract with the Green Bay Packers for three more seasons. So they control him for three more seasons, unless Aaron Rodgers says: 'I'm not going to play there anymore. I'm going to retire. I'm going to go rogue here and force my way out of there, and I want to be traded. And I want to be traded, let's just say, to Southern California where I own a home 20 minutes from the Rams facility. Or I want to be traded to the Bay Area where my football career started.'

"Now, I'm not telling you that it goes that way. I'm just telling you that was an unusual press conference. There were a lot of emotions. And he has to take some time and step back and figure out what he wants to do. And people think the Packers control him, when in fact Aaron Rodgers can flip it rather quickly by basically saying, 'I'm not going to play there, or I'm not going to play anymore -- trade me.' That would be his option. I'm not saying he's going to that. I'm just saying there's a lot of different ways this can go during the course of the offseason."

Here's how I think this will go down:

1. Within the next few months, Rodgers will inform the Packers he wants to be traded. And they'll trade him rather than force him into retirement because they won't want to make him a life-long enemy.

2. Rodgers will pick the 49ers as his new team because he's from Northern California and would like to play with George Kittle, Brandon Aiyuk and Deebo Samuel. I'm just assuming about the second part. I bet Rodgers would have loved the Packers to get Aiyuk instead of Jordan Freaking Love.

3. The 49ers and Packers will wait until after June 1 to make the deal official, which will allow Green Bay to create more than $17 million in salary cap space.

4. The 49ers will trade Nick Bosa and a first-round pick in 2022 for Rodgers.

5. The 49ers will extend Rodgers' contract to make him affordable so they can re-sign Trent Williams and Jason Verrett.

6. The 49ers will trade Jimmy Garoppolo to the New England Patriots for a second-round pick in 2022.

7. The 49ers will keep their 2021 first-round pick, which they'll use on an edge rusher to replace Bosa, or an offensive tackle to replace Mike McGlinchey.

8. The 49ers will win the Super Bowl next season.

9. I will look like a genius.

10. The 49ers will give me a nickel.


Published
Grant Cohn
GRANT COHN

Grant Cohn has covered the San Francisco 49ers daily since 2011. He spent the first nine years of his career with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat where he wrote the Inside the 49ers blog and covered famous coaches and athletes such as Jim Harbaugh, Colin Kaepernick and Patrick Willis. In 2012, Inside the 49ers won Sports Blog of the Year from the Peninsula Press Club. In 2020, Cohn joined FanNation and began writing All49ers. In addition, he created a YouTube channel which has become the go-to place on YouTube to consume 49ers content. Cohn's channel typically generates roughly 3.5 million viewers per month, while the 49ers' official YouTube channel generates roughly 1.5 million viewers per month. Cohn live streams almost every day and posts videos hourly during the football season. Cohn is committed to asking the questions that 49ers fans want answered, and providing the most honest and interactive coverage in the country. His loyalty is to the reader and the viewer, not the team or any player or coach. Cohn is a new-age multimedia journalist with an old-school mentality, because his father is Lowell Cohn, the legendary sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1979 to 1993. The two have a live podcast every Tuesday. Grant Cohn grew up in Oakland and studied English Literature at UCLA from 2006 to 2010. He currently lives in Oakland with his wife.