When Aaron Rodgers reported to training camp back on July 28, there was some speculation that the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback might actually play in the preseason, but with the team’s first game coming up on Thursday night, it’s starting to look like Rodgers won’t be playing at all.
The Steelers are hosting the Green Bay Packers in their preseason opener, and although this would give Rodgers a chance to face his former team, he doesn’t seem particularly interested. During his weekly press conference on Wednesday, Rodgers was asked if he wanted to play against the Packers and he didn’t mince his words.
“It’s preseason, it’s not real football,” Rodgers said. “So if I do, great. If not, great.”
Rodgers was also asked if there’s any advantage to playing in the preseason for someone like him, and he answered that with four words.
“I don’t think so,” the four-time MVP said.
Why Rodgers doesn’t see the need to play in the preseason
Rodgers has been in the NFL since 2005, and the preseason has evolved a lot during his 21 seasons in the league. When his career started, preseason games felt a little more like real games, but now, that’s simply not the case.
With teams running a vanilla playbook on both offense and defense, there’s really nothing to be gained by playing in the preseason, according to Rodgers.
“Preseason’s a lot different. Teams don’t run anything anymore,” Rodgers said. “They just really don’t.”
Over the past decade, most teams have changed their preseason philosophy: More teams are now participating in joint practices, and that’s where teams are showing off what they’ve been working on in training camp. However, Rodgers says that even joint practices have lost their luster.
“I think the first year we were doing them, it was fun,” Rodgers said of joint practices. “Because you got to play a team that wasn’t going to play how they played in the preseason. They were going to show you a lot of different things they were working on. It was like a real day at camp, but as that got on, it just stopped being like that. It just turned into fights, and nobody showed anything… I think those are a waste of a day.”
It’s interesting that Rodgers brought up the fact that fights are ruining joint practices, because there have been quite a few over the past few weeks. This week alone, we’ve seen the Jets scuffle with the Buccaneers while the 49ers got into it with the Titans.
In Rodgers words, if there’s a fight, then the practice essentially becomes “a waste of a day.”
The preseason debate
One of the hottest debates in the NFL over the years has been whether you should play your key starters in the preseason. Some coaches, like Sean McVay, are absolutely against it, and because of that, you definitely won’t see Matthew Stafford on the field for a single play during the preseason.
That being said, not everyone thinks like McVay. Matt LaFleur is on the opposite end of the debate: The Packers coach thinks it can be good for the starters to see some action in the preseason.
“I do think there’s a lot of value for all our guys to just get mentally prepared to go play a game, whether it’s one play, whether it’s three plays, 10 plays, the whole game,” LaFleur said this week, via the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. “I think there’s a ton of value in that, just getting your process down.”
LaFleur is expected to play most of his starters, including Jordan Love, for at least one possession against the Steelers.
As for Rodgers, it doesn’t sound like he’s going to be on the field against Green Bay, but he’ll still be helping out. The 42-year-old, who didn’t play during the preseason last year, has a routine he likes to stick to when he’s on the sideline, and it usually involves being on the headset.
“I like to be on the headset and calm everybody down,” Rodgers said. “Usually, the first game, it’s a little hectic on the headset, so I like to be the voice of reason, an occasional dad joke or one-liner, just keep everybody settled in a little bit.”
The preseason might not matter to players like Rodgers, but it means a lot to all the players on the backend of the roster who are still fighting for a spot on the team. It also matters to almost every rookie, who will get to show their ability in an NFL game for the first time.
For established veterans, the preseason doesn’t mean as much, and most older guys probably feel the same way about the preseason as Rodgers does; they’re just not as vocal about it.
