Rodgers: Over & Out

By BRUCE LOWITT
Quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who sat out the Pittsburgh Steelers’ opening preseason game victory over the Jacksonville Jaguars, announced that he will carry a clipboard not only during the Steelers’ remaining exhibition games in August but for the entire regular season “because I’ve decided, for one thing, that I’m too fucking old for this shit.”
“I’m forty-one years old and I’ll be forty two before the season ends, assuming I live through it,” Rodgers said. “I mean, what the hell was Pittsburgh even thinking, signing me to a contract? I don’t need a bunch of two-hundred-and-fifty to three-hundred-pound guys half my age pounding on me. I mean, have you seen the way I escaped the pass rush quarterbacking the (New York) Jets? I didn’t, because I couldn’t.”
Other reasons he gave for his decision to become an assistant coach and take a pay cut, like most of Rodgers’ decisions during his 20-year NFL career, bordered on inscrutable, starting with complaints about his helmet. “It looks like a damn spaceship,” he said of a new league-approved model that replaced the no-longer-acceptable helmet he prefers. “So my old helmet doesn’t prevent concussions. So what? My brain is … uh … my brain … um … What were we talking about?”
“I only mentioned the helmet problem because I didn’t want to bring up the other issues I’ve had since I joined the team,” he said. “For one thing, the color black brings out feelings of anger and sadness in me, and yellow stands for cowardice and deceitfulness – and both colors represent aggression.
“Also,” he added, “none of the jockstraps they’ve given me has fit me. You try keeping your mind on the game when your balls are in an uproar.”
Coach Mike Tomlin, an avid supporter of Rodgers when reports of him joining the Steelers after two miserable seasons with the Jets, tore into him. “If it was up to me,” he grumbled, “I’d tell Aaron to go out there with a leather helmet, or a yarmulke, or no helmet at all.”
“I’m trying to run a football team and he’s bitching about helmets, jockstraps, and uniform colors? Maybe he should have spent more time learning the names of his receivers or, better yet, the linemen who were going to be protecting his old, slow ass.”
Rodgers’ career is speckled with bizarre behavior including his reliance on ayahuasca and Hapé, his four days and nights in a total darkness retreat, saying he was “immunized” against COVID-19 when he was unvaccinated, and a lengthy dispute with Jimmy Kimmel after suggesting the late-night TV host was connected to Jeffrey Epstein’s “list” of associates.
Mason Rudolph, a backup Pittsburgh QB for four years who signed last season with Tennessee, returned to the Steelers as a free agent in January and likely will inherit the starting job.
“He looks a lot better than the guy who left a year ago,” Tomlin said. “Mason looks a lot more like the kind of guy I want under center. In other words, not a fucking whack job!”