Photo by: original: Mike Morbeck
derivative: Diddykong1130
Public realm
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/sports/football/aaron-rodgers-green-bay-packers.html
From The NY Times:
By Mike Tanier
- Sept. 30, 2020
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.
PWS
10-01-20