Aaron Rodgers is in the weeds
In his latest media-related dustup, the New York Jets quarterback reminds everyone that he's not finished fighting pandemic-era battles
It really shouldn’t be ending like this.
Even if Aaron Rodgers, one of the best NFL quarterbacks of all time, was unable to replicate the late-career second acts of Peyton Manning and Tom Brady, both of whom were plunked into Super Bowl-ready teams and promptly won Super Bowls, there’s no great shame in trying to squeeze a last run out of an ageing body.
Nobody holds the Kansas City years against Joe Montana.
If Rodgers had just gone to the New York Jets, wrecked his leg, then came back and struggled this season, as he has, that would be that. He’d probably even be getting credit for trying to do the impossible: turn the Jets into a competent franchise.
But for three years now, Rodgers has had a boulder-sized chip on his shoulder. He was widely criticized in the 2021 season for lying about his vaccination status, a trick that allowed him to ignore the rules that had been imposed on players who had decided not to get COVID-19 vaccinations. He said back then that his critics were acting at the behest of Big Pharma, a common refrain at the time that was nevertheless ridiculous. I was a columnist then for the biggest newspaper chain in Canada, and can say with complete confidence that Pfizer was not directing my coverage.
Amazingly, Rodgers still seems to think this is true. It shows just how deep down the anti-vax conspiracist rabbit hole he has gone.
The backstory: Rodgers has come in for a lot of criticism this season. That’s fair enough. The Jets have been awful, and he’s played poorly, a fact that is not too surprising given that he is 41 years old and coming off surgery to repair a torn Achilles.
Rodgers, who makes weekly appearances on the Pat McAfee show on ESPN, where he is a paid contributor, took some umbrage at all this last week. He said that 15 years ago, ESPN was a simpler place that mostly stuck to game coverage and highlight shows. He decried that so much of its airtime now was devoted to people who say controversial things:
“Now, it’s all talk shows and people whose opinions are so important now and they believe they’re the celebrities now, they’re the stars for just being able to talk about sports or give a take about sports, many of which are unfounded or asinine, as we all know. But that’s the environment we’re in now.”
He actually has a point there. I mean, it’s a bit weird to complain about the talk show environment on a literal ESPN talk show, but it is true that the opinion-generation machine of those daily shows has a lot more influence now than it did when Rodgers was in the prime of his career.
ESPN’s Ryan Clark, appearing on one of those chat shows, First Take, rose to the bait:
“The reason you’re getting the opportunity to say these asinine things is because someone is paying you— exactly like the people you’re calling out.”
Again, fair point. It was a little hypocritical. Clark also called Rodgers a fraud, which honestly seemed a bit much and kind of proved the quarterback’s point: The takes, they must be given.
So, that’s the background. This week in his McAfee appearance, Rodgers really let the veil drop, implying that there was some kind of pharmaceutical-company motivation behind the criticism of him:
“But just before you (criticize me) … just state your vax status, so that anything you say afterwards gets put in the right light. Just get it out there. Because then when you say things about me, people can at least be like, ‘Oh, you are captured by the multibillion-dollar propaganda Skyhawk and you’re still upset about it’
Um. OK. And now, he was off:
“Just so everybody knows where you’re coming from. Everybody knows. OK, cool, you’re twice vaxed Moderna with three booster shots, and then boom, boom, boom say what you want to say, whatever. I don’t care. I’m just saying a PSA, just please help everybody out who’s wondering, ‘Where is this coming from?’ Including myself. I’m like, ‘Where the fuck’s this coming from?’ But just give a little PSA. Do a little bit of digging and then you know where it’s all coming from. You’re captured, you’re highly vaccinated, and then say whatever the hell you want to say about me because I couldn’t give two shits about it.”
That is some pharmaceutical-grade nonsense, right there. But it’s also fascinating. That man has not moved on. I don’t think it’s over-generalizing to say that for the vast majority of people who took COVID-19 shots, they simply do not think about it anymore. Maybe you still get boosters, maybe you don’t, but either way it’s not a defining characteristic of your life. But Rodgers is still in the anti-vax trenches, like it’s a major part of his identity. Is he going to still be going on about it years from now, like one of those soldiers who was marooned on a Pacific island and didn’t realize the Second World War was over? “And now, for my Hall of Fame induction speech, I have some things to say about Anthony Fauci.”
To be fair to Rodgers here, he’s not alone in this. A lot of people who embraced the most conspiratorial parts of the anti-vax stuff in the pandemic have not exactly let it go. Which makes some kind of sense: once you convince yourself that the world is secretly run by pharma companies and Bill Gates or whatever, it’s hard to just drop it and get on with your life.
The surprising part to me is that Rodgers would seem particularly well-suited to dropping the whole thing. He’s an NFL quarterback getting paid tens of millions of dollars and he has countless millions more in the bank. (And, let’s be honest, probably crypto.) He has a Super Bowl and a passel of MVP awards and would be on anyone’s short list of greatest ever throwers of footballs. Seems like a pretty good life! It just seems like it would be so much easier to spend the last years of your playing career not being a crank?
Rodgers, evidently, disagrees.
In other Jets-related news
My latest piece for theScore is on the Winnipeg Jets, and attendance issues. I covered the series in which they returned to the playoffs for the first time since the franchise moved from Atlanta, and it was honestly a semi-religious experience. That town was into it.
But they are a little less into it now. As the piece explains. Not everyone agrees. This did make me laugh, though:
Happy weekend, everyone.