Aaron Rodgers and the Packers Are Heading for a Divorce. How Did We Get Here?

“We’re not idiots,” Packers CEO Mark Murphy told reporters in January. “Aaron Rodgers will be back. He’s our leader.”

Murphy said this one day after the Packers lost to the Buccaneers in last season’s NFC championship game. Rodgers seemed crushed by that defeat, and explained why during his postgame press conference. “[The Packers have] a lot of guys’ futures that are uncertain—myself included,” he said. “That’s what’s sad about it most, getting this far. Obviously, it’s going to be an end at some point, whether we make it past this one or not, but just the uncertainty is tough and finality of it all.”

A week earlier, Rodgers told reporters, “My future is a beautiful mystery.”

The mystery deepened Thursday in spectacular fashion, overshadowing the first round of the NFL draft and tossing the league into a state of chaos. ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported that Rodgers is “so disgruntled” that he “has told some within the organization that he does not want to return to the team.” Fox’s Jay Glazer confirmed that report and wrote that Rodgers is “pretty strongly convicted that he doesn’t want to go back to Packers.” Trey Wingo reported that the Packers brass told Rodgers they would trade him in the offseason, but later changed their minds. “It’s been a bleep show between them ever since,” Wingo tweeted. “And within the last week Rodgers told the team … trade or no trade I’m not coming back.” Packers general manager Brian Gutekunst vehemently denied this after the first round.

Rodgers has been with Green Bay since he was drafted in 2005. He’s passed for more than 50,000 yards and 400 touchdowns. He went from usurping franchise legend Brett Favre to matching him in Super Bowl wins (one), MVP awards (three), and legendary Packers moments (4,387). Rodgers is the face of the Packers, and he’s been called the most gifted quarterback ever to play football. Now he wants out.

If Rodgers gets Green Bay to send him elsewhere, it would mark the first time a reigning MVP has ever been traded. It would also change the NFL’s competitive landscape as we know it. So how did the relationship between one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time and the league’s most storied franchise go completely to shit ?

The Rodgers news flood came this week, but the pressure had clearly been building for months before the dam broke. That makes the timing of these reports curious. If Rodgers’s camp leaked this information Thursday, it had to know that waiting until hours before the draft probably would not lead to a trade. Astonishingly, Gutekunst said he didn’t get much trade interest in Rodgers after news of the quarterback’s unhappiness broke. “Sometime after 5 o’clock, after a lot of the stuff had kind of hit the airwaves, I got I think one call,” Gutekunst told reporters. “It was very brief, and that was it.

By the time these Rodgers reports dropped, several teams had already made their big quarterback moves of the offseason: The Rams had traded for Matthew Stafford, the Colts had traded for Carson Wentz, the 49ers had traded up to acquire the draft’s no. 3 pick (which they used on Trey Lance), the Panthers had dealt for Sam Darnold, and the Broncos had traded for Teddy Bridgewater. If Rodgers wanted a move to happen, he needed to make these feelings known months ago. Yet while he didn’t get dealt, he did successfully humiliate the Packers on draft day a year after they humiliated him.

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Why does Rodgers want out? Consider the context. Last offseason, Tom Brady left the Patriots for the Buccaneers, and Tampa Bay did whatever it took to surround him with a talented offensive supporting cast: It traded for Rob Gronkowski, drafted prized lineman Tristan Wirfs, and signed Leonard Fournette and Antonio Brown as free agents. Over the past few years, the Saints took salary-cap gymnastics to the extreme to provide Drew Brees with playmakers for his final few playoff runs: They brought in players like Emmanuel Sanders and Jared Cook while keeping their entire core intact. (At one point this offseason, the Saints were $100 million over the cap.) Say what you want about New Orleans’s wild spending habits and history of trading away draft picks, but nobody can doubt its sense of urgency.

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Then there’s the Packers. They went 13-3 in the 2019 season and were blown out by the 49ers in the NFC championship game. They responded to that with the exact opposite of urgency. When everyone and their mother wanted them to take a wideout in the 2020 draft, which had one of the deepest receiver classes in years, Green Bay traded up to select Utah State quarterback Jordan Love at no. 26. Then, in the second round, the Packers took Boston College running back AJ Dillon. This may go down as one of the most catastrophic drafts for a team ever. It’s one thing to draft a quarterback who busts. It’s another to draft a quarterback whose selection convinces your franchise icon and future first-ballot Hall of Famer to leave.

Even more mind-numbing is that Green Bay’s first two picks—Love and Dillon—were third-stringers for last season’s playoff run. Love is the only offensive player the Packers have taken in the first round since 2012, but he wasn’t active for a single game. (Tim Boyle was the backup QB.) Dillon was a reserve running back. Coming off a 13-3 campaign, the Packers used their first two draft picks to take players who did nothing to improve their roster. Meanwhile, the Bucs drafted who started at left tackle, and Antoine Winfield Jr., a defensive back who started 16 regular-season games and then picked off Patrick Mahomes in the Super Bowl.