"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, Music, Politics, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt and Dr. Alicia Triche, expert brief writer, practical scholar, emeritus Editor-in-Chief of The Green Card (FBA), and 2022 Federal Bar Association Immigration Section Lawyer of the Year. She is a/k/a “Delta Ondine,” a blues-based alt-rock singer-songwriter, who performs regularly in Memphis, where she hosts her own Blues Brunch series, and will soon be recording her first full, professional album. Stay tuned! 🎶 To see our complete professional bios, just click on the link below.
Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers has a reputation as someone who always wishes to speak to the manager.
To the public he is the beer snob who turns up his nose at all 500 brewpub taps, the faultfinding co-worker whose arrival prompts everyone to politely excuse themselves from the break room with their lunches half-eaten. No pass route is ever run precisely enough for Rodgers, no game plan creative enough for his talents, and dissatisfaction radiates from him with the passive-aggressive fury of a million failed marriages.
Nevertheless, Rodgers’s 2020 season is off to an excellent start. The Packers are 3-0 after a 37-30 victory in Sunday night’s duel with Drew Brees and the New Orleans Saints. Rodgers is tied for third in the N.F.L. with nine touchdown passes, ranks sixth with 887 passing yards and third with a 121.1 efficiency rating.
His success should be unsurprising for an eight-time Pro Bowl selection and former Super Bowl champion, except that 2020 was supposed to be the year that the perpetually disgruntled 36-year-old Rodgers earned his comeuppance at the hand of a rookie heir apparent, Jordan Love.
. . . .
In the wake of so much melodrama, this Packers season was expected to be part “All About Eve” and part “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” with a dash of “Sunset Boulevard.” But Rodgers has proved that he is still ready for his close-up.
He is also playing nicely with others: With his favorite receiver, Davante Adams, hobbled, Rodgers has been connecting with his secondary targets instead of heaving the ball out of bounds and lamenting his lack of weapons in postgame interviews. Rodgers is even operating comfortably within LaFleur’s system, distributing short tosses while waiting for ideal opportunities to unleash his (still magnificent) deep ball.
Perhaps Rodgers has become a model employee out of sheer spite, though if Rodgers were truly motivated by spite he might have conquered the world by now. Perhaps it took a rookie’s arrival to persuade both sides — Rodgers and the coaching staff — to work things out for the sake of a Super Bowl instead of plunging the team into free agency and a rebuilding era. Or, just maybe, Rodgers’s churlish reputation is somewhat overblown, as were observations about his deteriorating skills.
Whatever the cause of Rodgers’s resurgence, it has caught N.F.L. talk-show dramatists without a narrative arc for him. He is not yet a venerable warrior like Brees or Tom Brady. He’s certainly not a young hero like Mahomes or Lamar Jackson. He never fell far enough for comeback player of the year redemption and he won too many accolades to join Russell Wilson on a quest for validation. And he refuses to play the role of arrogant heel as cast. He is just a future Hall of Famer on the inside track toward a return to the Super Bowl.
Ho hum.
**********************
So far, so good.
Russell Wilson of the Seahawks, who transferred to the Wisconsin Badgers and “lit up” the Big-10 in his final season, is another grossly underrated player. Many pundits claimed Wilson was “too short” to play in the NFL. All he does is pass, run, score, win, and lead, under a variety of conditions! Seems like that should be enough to put him at or near the top of the “upper echelon” of NFL QBs.
Aaron Rodgers Quarterback Green Bay PackersDevante Adams Wide Receiver Green Bay Packers
“OLD MAN” A.R. SHOWS HE’S STILL GOT IT WHEN IT COUNTS, AS PACK REACHES NFC CHAMPIONSHIP GAME WITH 28-23 VICTORY OVER SEATTLE!
By Paul Wickham Schmidt
Special to Courtside Sports
Jan. 13, 2020. January night darkness fell over historic frigid Lambeau Field in Green Bay, WI. Late fourth quarter, third and long, from deep in Packer territory. Aaron Rodgers drops back and throws a strike to his favorite target, wide receiver Devante Adams for a first down in Seahawk territory.
Game over? No way! The Seattle defense stiffens and less than 20 seconds later, Rodgers and the Pack face another “moment of truth:” third and nine at the Seahawk 45 with two minutes left. Rodgers avoids the ferocious rush and shoots a pass to former Seahawk Jimmy Graham for exactly 9 yards and a game-ending first down. With Seattle out of timeouts, the Packers kneel down, run out the clock, and keep the dangerous Russell Wilson from getting another shot at late-game heroics.
Too old, too spoiled, overrated, lost his touch – Rodgers heard all the criticism during a 14-3 regular season where the Packers more often than not “won ugly.” They frequently relied on the running and catching of “the other Aaron” – Aaron Jones — and a “stout when it had to be” defense led by the newly acquired “Smith boys” at linebacker. With only a few exceptions, Rodgers and the passing offense were regularly accused of “underperforming” by the pundits and the media even as the Pack piled up wins en route to a NFC North Championship.
Another Pack veteran stalwart who “showed up” on Sunday night was Adams, who had been slowed by injuries during the regular season. He set a franchise playoff record with 160 receiving yards (including two touchdowns) on eight catches. Jones added two rushing touchdowns, bringing him within one of the season team record held by Ahman Green. He also added 62 hard-fought rushing yards on 21 carries to allow the “Pack attack” to remain “balanced” against a Seahawk defense keyed on stopping the run.
The heroics of Rodgers, Adams, Jones, Graham, and the Smiths overcame an amazing performance by Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson, who finished out his collegiate career as a Wisconsin Badger. The vastly underappreciated Wilson wasn’t just Seattle’s best player, he basically was the franchise Sunday night.
He single-handedly willed and played the Seahawks back into contention, with a chance to win, in a game where they twice trailed by 18. The Seahawks couldn’t run, didn’t block well, putting Wilson under extreme pressure on nearly every down, dropped some key passes, missed a field goal, and had no answer for Rodgers and Adams when it counted. Yet, with 21 completions and a team-high 64 yards rushing, Wilson bobbed, weaved, evaded, ran, threw, and led the Seahawks to three second half touchdowns to close the gap to a mere five points in the fourth quarter.
Amazingly on such a cold night under so much pressure, there were no turnovers by either team and very few penalties, a tribute to Packer Head Coach Matt LaFleur and Seahawk Head Coach Pete Carroll and their respective staffs. Speaking of LaFleur, seldom has a “rookie” coach of a 14-3 team gotten so little credit or “buzz” in the media or from the fans.
Most of the focus this season was on his relationship with Rodgers, the struggles of the offense, the failure of either the offense or defense to rank among the league’s best, an “easy” schedule, “lucky” wins, and some embarrassing defeats. All the guy did was take a team that won only six games and was and in shambles after missing the playoffs for the second consecutive season, and lead them to within a game of the Super Bowl with only a few major roster changes, almost none on offense.
But, the lack of accolades is probably of little moment to LaFleur and Rodgers right now as they prepare for San Francisco. It’s a huge chance to avenge one of their worst moments of 2019 – a 37-8 creaming at the hands of the 49ers at Levi’s field back in November. In that game, Rodgers was simply horrible, passing for just slightly over 100 yards. And, Lafleur was thoroughly out-coached by Kyle Shanahan, as the Niners literally and figuratively ran all over the hapless Pack that afternoon on both offense and defense.
LaFleur and Rodgers promise that things will be different this Sunday. From the standpoint of “Packer Nation,” let‘s hope they are right! But, the oddsmakers in Las Vegas are having none of the “Packer hype.” They quickly installed the Niners as solid seven point favorites!
Packers 17, Seattle Seahawks 0
