What Could Have Been for the Packers with Aaron Rodgers
Aaron Rodgers was finally traded last week. For the Jets, it’s a move they’ve been waiting to complete for months. For the Packers, it’s a move they’ve been waiting to complete since April of 2020.
That’s when GM Brian Gutekunst opted to use a 1st and 4th-round pick to draft Rodgers’ successor. Instead of using everything at his disposal to maximize the remaining years of one of the best to ever play the game, he focused his attention and team-building capital on life after Rodgers.
It’s hard to view the three years since as anything other than a massive miscalculation and a missed opportunity.
Gutekunst Was Wrong
Gutekunst announced publicly in the 2020 NFL Draft that Aaron Rodgers was done. He didn’t utter the words necessarily, but that’s basically what he was saying by using a first-round pick (and a fourth) on a quarterback.
No matter what Green Bay wants to claim, Jordan Love wasn’t supposed to sit for 3 seasons. A 1st-round pick doesn’t get used on a quarterback if the plan is to have him hold a clipboard for his first 50 games. It’s used with the expectation that he’ll be the guy in year 1, or at worst, year 2.
That it’s happened twice in Green Bay in the last 20 years is a mere coincidence.
That Aaron Rodgers won two straight MVPs immediately after Gutekunst’s public declaration shows it was an incorrect assessment and the wrong move at the time.
To be clear, I don’t think it’s a bad thing for teams to plan for the future, especially at the quarterback position. But there’s a time and a place for everything. Quarterbacks like Aaron Rodgers don’t come along very often. They shouldn’t be taken for granted. If you have a championship window with a special player like Rodgers, you should try to take advantage. After all, the goal is to win a Lombardi Trophy, isn’t it?
The Packers Were on the Verge in 2020
From a roster-building standpoint, it obviously doesn’t make sense for teams to push all of their chips into the middle every season. But there are certain windows of time when it does. After the 2019 season, the Packers were in one of those windows.
In that first year with Matt LaFleur as head coach, the Packers overachieved to go 13-3 and reach the NFC Championship Game. Then they got dismantled by the 49ers, who ran for nearly 300 yards and only had to attempt 8 passes on the way to scoring 37 points.
The Packers had some holes to fill to get over the hump, but they appeared to be close.
History is in the process of being re-written these days. But after that 2019 season, it was clear that the 36-year old Rodgers still had a lot of good football left. After that NFC Championship Game blowout, I even wrote about what the Packers should do with Rodgers moving forward.
I didn’t necessarily predict that he’d go on to win two MVPs. But I did clearly state that the Packers had to lean on Rodgers more because he still had it. Whatever drop off there was to his game physically was almost unnoticeable.
Just look at some of these throws from the second half of that 2019 NFC Championship Game if you don’t believe me:
It seems so obvious in retrospect. But if I could see that at the time as some slapdick who watches (way too much) All-22 for fun, how could the Packers GM not see it?
I’ve seen some try to justify the Packers’ decision in 2020 by saying that Rodgers had a worrying 3-year decline from 2017-19. But that wasn’t really the case.