Aaron Rodgers finally ended months of soul-searching by agreeing to a deal with the Pittsburgh Steelers earlier this month. After far too long without a real answer at quarterback, the Steelers have their guy for 2025. And they got him on a very team-friendly deal at $13.65 million (including $10 million guaranteed), which could rise to just under $20 million with incentives.
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A couple of weeks after the announcement of the deal and Rodgers’s first OTAs in the Black and Gold, Rodgers returned to one of his favorite places in the world: The Pat McAfee Show. Rodgers hadn’t made one of his regular appearances on the ESPN show in a while, and he dropped a bomb this time around: 2025 could be his final year in the NFL.
The quote made headlines, but for a lot of football people, the response was: um, yeah, duh? He will be 42 by the end of the 2025 season, and he didn’t exactly have teams banging down his door to sign him this offseason. NBC’s Mike Florio was in the camp that believed Rodgers’ declaration was not worth the ink to print the headline.
“Look at what his words were. ‘I’m pretty sure this will be my last season.’ Okay? Yeah, so am I! So is everyone. We’re all pretty sure it will be his last season. I don’t even know why that’s a headline. I know we wrote the story on PFT, and we have to, because he addressed it,” said the PFT journalist.
Florio continued to break down why he thought Rodgers’ quote wasn’t worth the time to cover it, saying that he was just repeating things that most people who are plugged in already know.
“He’s not saying anything we don’t already know! Of course, it’s fairly clear it’s gonna be his last season. And he said, well that’s why I did a one-year deal. That has nothing to do with it. … You could do a two-year deal and then retire, you could do a one-year deal and do another one-year deal. ‘I’m pretty sure it’s gonna be my last season,’ isn’t news, although it became news.”
We definitely feel a rare kinship with Florio here, as we agree that Rodgers’ statement didn’t provide us with any information we didn’t already know or suspect. But we still have to cover it. It’s mid-June, and it’s Aaron Rodgers. Our hands are tied.
Can Aaron Rodgers make a major impact in one year in the Steel City? Well, there’s no chance the Steelers are winning a Super Bowl this year unless Rodgers time travels back to 2011 and switches bodies with his old self.
But if he can win them their first playoff game in nearly a decade, the Black and Gold faithful will thank him and shake his hand as he trots off into the sunset and out of the public eye forever.
