Sports franchises may be built off the blood and sweat of its greatest players, but teams cannot afford to grow too sentimental. After all, franchises outlast their star players all the time. Thus, when the time came for the Green Bay Packers to start preparing for its future sans longtime quarterback Aaron Rodgers, they took the chance to do so, selecting Jordan Love with the 26th overall pick of the 2020 NFL Draft.
However, doing so may have been the beginning of the end of Rodgers' storied tenure with the Packers.
Speaking with Matt Schneidman of The Athletic, Aaron Rodgers revealed that he felt like the Packers saw the writing on the wall following the disappointing way they exited the 2020 playoffs — which then meant that parting ways with the franchise he has called home since 2005 was a mere inevitability.
“We didn’t win the Super Bowl. They had their guy in waiting. Unless things changed, I felt like — that’s why I said what I said — there was a possibility they were gonna move on,” Rodgers said.
“I knew that [drafting] (Love) was always a possibility, that they would wanna go, ‘You know what? We tried hard, we tried to win a championship. We had a good team, but now it might be time to go with Jordan, move some contract stuff around and do that.'”
Even then, Aaron Rodgers also said that he wished that the Packers decided to draft for need back in 2020, helping the team run it back, and perhaps, advance deeper into the playoffs. Alas, they instead lost to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the same round they fell short in the prior year.
“Did I wanna, years down the line, go, ‘Well, what if we had just taken somebody who could impact our team because we had just gone to the NFC Championship?’ Yeah, of course. I don’t think any other competitor would say anything different,” Rodgers added.
Now, Aaron Rodgers is bracing for the next chapter of his career with the New York Jets. Meanwhile, the Packers will be hoping, after an 8-9 2022-23 season, that entrusting the franchise to Jordan Love (essentially freeing up funds to bolster other parts of the roster) proves to be the best decision they could have made.
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