The 90 to 1 Green Bay Packers roster countdown: No. 1 – Aaron Rodgers
The Green Bay Packers, and their 90 players on the roster, are in the midst of their first training camp under coach Matt LaFleur. In an annual tradition from my 11 years at Packer Report, I rank the players in order of importance from No. 90 to No. 1. This isn’t just a listing of the team’s best players. Our rankings take into account talent, importance of the position, depth at the position, salary and draft history. More than the ranking, we hope you learn something about each player. (Note: The start of this series can be found with my former employer.)
No. 1: QB Aaron Rodgers ($26,500,000 cap)
On the evening of Feb. 6, 2011, a potential dynasty took its first steps.
Behind the clutch play of Rodgers, their third-year starting quarterback, the Packers took down the Pittsburgh Steelers to win their fourth Super Bowl championship. Rodgers was a young star whose best days were ahead of him. Sure enough, Rodgers kept ascending. He won MVP honors in 2011 and 2014, and he played perhaps the best football of his career in leading the Packers from the abyss to the NFC Championship Game in 2016.
But as he embarks on his 15th NFL and 12th as the team’s starter, Rodgers has as many Super Bowl rings as Trent Dilfer, Joe Flacco and Brad Johnson. On that victorious night at Cowboys Stadium eight-and-a-half years ago, the question was how many Super Bowls would Rodgers win in his career? Today, with Rodgers set to turn 36 in December, the question is obvious and obviously different.
Will Rodgers even win a second Super Bowl, let alone three or four or more?
Not since 2008, when they finished 6-10 and got knocked around twice by the Brett Favre-led Vikings, have the Packers seemed so far away from getting their hands on another Lombardi Trophy.
Rodgers got his massive contract extension – $134 million through the 2023 season – but can he stay healthy enough to provide a winning return on investment?
Rodgers got a new coach. Matt LaFleur might have the right scheme but does he have the right stuff?
Rodgers has a more aggressive general manager to provide the supporting cast, but can Brian Gutekunst put the right pieces in place?
Throughout most of his tenure as the starter, Rodgers has had superb groups of receivers. Davante Adams is the latest star, but are there enough quality perimeter weapons to serve as complementary pieces?
That’s a lot of uncertainty. What is certain is LaFleur offers Rodgers his best chance – and perhaps last legitimate chance – to add a second Super Bowl ring to his considerable resume. At times the past few seasons, Rodgers became exasperated with former coach Mike McCarthy. The offense seemed to be wholly dependent on Rodgers donning a Superman cape and trying to manufacture chunk plays.
That worked in the good old days, when Rodgers had an abundance of talent on the perimeter. In reaching championship games in 2014 and 2016, Rodgers had Jordy Nelson, Randall Cobb and Adams. In 2011, when the Packers fielded one of the great offenses in NFL history, Rodgers could distribute the football to Nelson, Greg Jennings, Jermichael Finley, James Jones, Donald Driver and Cobb. It didn’t work so well last season, though, with Nelson playing for Oakland, Cobb limping his way through another underperforming season and nobody emerging to take the bull’s-eye off Adams.
All of that conspired against Rodgers. Rodgers entered last season with a career passer rating of 103.8, the best in NFL history. Last season, he finished just 13th with a rating of 97.6. While his 25 touchdowns vs. two interceptions gave him one of the best touchdown-to-interception ratios in NFL history, he was a woeful 26th with a 62.3 percent completion rate, 17th with 7.44 yards per attempt and 21st with a touchdown rate of 4.2 percent.
In other words, by his standards, Rodgers had a miserable season. In reality, by any standards, Rodgers was mediocre. His rating was barely better than Chicago’s Mitchell Trubisky.
Enter LaFleur, who won’t ask Rodgers to be Superman. Since Day 1, LaFleur has said he wants to make life easier for his quarterback. That means more of a running game after the Packers fielded the most pass-happy attack in the NFL last season. A running game means the return of the play-action passing attack, which was irrelevant last year. Quick routes and bunch formations should provide some easier completions.
“I like the scheme. I mean, I do. I like the scheme a lot,” Rodgers said on Tuesday. “I like the stresses that it puts on defenses. I like the marriage of the run game with the action. I like our concepts from both stack alignments, bunch alignments and from wide alignments. I think it’s going to be very tough to get a bead on what we’re doing. We do more under-center stuff, which I’m totally confident with and comfortable under center. I feel like that allows us to get some more one-high stuff as many defenses basically have checks – if you’re in the gun it’s two-high, if you’re under center it’s one-high. I think it’s going to allow us to open some more things up, get some one-on-one opportunities outside.”
In time, LaFleur’s offense should work because the history of the offense says it will work. When LaFleur was quarterbacks coach in Atlanta, Matt Ryan won MVP and led the Falcons to the Super Bowl in 2016. When LaFleur was offensive coordinator in Los Angeles, the Rams went from last in the NFL in scoring in 2016 to first in 2017.
But will the offense, which has struggled to find its way through 11 practices of training camp, get into a groove in time for the regular season? The Packers play five of their first seven games at home. If Rodgers and Co. struggle out of the gates, the season could be over by the time it hits the road for the second half of the season. And if that’s the case, another year of Rodgers will have gone down the drain.
Age isn’t the only reason why time is of the essence. For this season, Rodgers ranks fifth among quarterbacks with his $26.5 million cap charge. The landscape will truly change in 2020. Not only will Rodgers’ cap charge soar to a third-ranked $32.6 million, but that’s when the big money starts to kick in for free-agent additions Za’Darius Smith, Preston Smith and Adrian Amos. Only seven teams have less cap space for 2020 than the Packers, so the core to this team has to be good enough because Gutekunst won’t have the flexibility to make another big splash in free agency.
“My career’s at stake every year I go out there,” Rodgers said. “I’ve got to perform, otherwise they’re going to find somebody who can come in here and do it just as well for less. We all know that. Everybody’s expendable. Every great player that I’ve been around here just about has either finished up somewhere else or had a disappointing end to their time here. So, I’d like to not be one of those guys but I’m realistic enough to realize it’s happened to a lot of my close friends. I need to play well, I expect to play well, expect for us to be successful.”
