After a lengthy back-and-forth process, the Green Bay Packers finally agreed to a blockbuster trade deal with the New York Jets for the services of superstar quarterback Aaron Rodgers. It was a long time coming, but the actual trade took a lot longer than most folks expected. Now that it's done, it appears that it will remain to be a contentious topic of conversation also much longer than we initially hoped.
It has now become a he-said, she-said situation wherein what Rodgers is claiming pretty much contradicts the narrative the Packers and general manager Brian Gutenkust is selling. For his part, the four-time league MVP is sticking with his story — or at least the latest version of the same. According to Rodgers, the reason why he was unable to properly communicate with the Packers during the process was brought about by the fact that he had little to no network reception at home:
“I have zero or one bar at the house, so you call me — sometimes it goes through, most of the time it drops and doesn’t go through,” Rodgers said, via Matt Schneidman of The Athletic. “Everybody who knows me, when I’m out west, they know that’s how to get a hold of me. So you can say whatever you want about that, but that’s the f**king truth.”
Rodgers then went on to berate Gutenkust and the Packers for the supposed lies they're trying to spew. the 10-time Pro Bowl quarterback just wants the truth to come out:
“Did Brian text me more than I texted him?” Rodgers told Schneidman. “Yeah, but did I ghost him? No. I texted him back. There was back-and-forths that we had and so this is the story you wanna go with? You’re gonna stand on this hill of austerity and say that arguably in the conversation of the best player in your franchise history, you’re gonna say I couldn’t get a hold of him and that’s why we had to move on?
“Like, come on, man. Just tell the truth, you wanted to move on. You didn’t like the fact that we didn’t communicate all the time. Like, listen, I talk to the people that I like.”
The problem with Aaron Rodgers' version of “the truth” is that it has a lot of holes. For one, Gutenkust himself argues that the Packers made multiple efforts to contact Rodgers throughout the process, but that he just refused to properly engage. There was also a period when Rodgers entered his self-imposed “darkness retreat,” which fell right smack in the middle of the trade negotiations. Rodgers could not have believed that everything was fine before going dark only to emerge days later to realize that it actually wasn't.
In the end, both parties wanted to get a deal done. The Packers wanted to move on from Rodgers, and for his part, it is also clear that the 39-year-old also wanted to take his talents to New York. As it seems, the highly-controversial trade process just didn't happen the way Rodgers wanted it to unfold, and it appears that he's going to continue speaking his truths for the foreseeable future or for as long as people will continue to want to listen. Given that this is Aaron Rodgers we're talking about here, it doesn't sound like this issue is going to die down anytime soon.