Aaron Rodgers and the Packers resolved their differences for 2021, but there isn’t much certainty beyond this season.
Rodgers knows this. He also doesn’t want the Derek Jeter treatment.
“I don’t want a farewell tour,” Rodgers said Wednesday, via ESPN. “I don’t know what’s going to happen after the season, but I’m going to enjoy it with the right perspective, for sure, and not look at it as I’m getting through this. I’m going to enjoy the hell out of all of it.”
Rodgers and the Packers are again positioned to make a run at the NFC title, and after striking out on the doorstep of the Super Bowl in consecutive seasons, there’s no better time than the present to go all in — and for Rodgers, to live in the moment.
The quarterback said he first got a taste of what it felt like to be living his final weeks with the Packers in 2020, when he realized that even if he won the league’s Most Valuable Player award and won a Super Bowl, he still wasn’t looking at long-term security with the Packers. The chances of that disappeared as soon as Green Bay spent its 2020 first-round pick on Jordan Love.
Rodgers instead decided to savor the moments he had left while fully knowing he didn’t know how many would be ahead.
“The reason I approached it like that is I just knew when the pick was made that the clock had started, for sure,” Rodgers said. “And I thought unless there was something in the season that really made me feel like I’m going to be here past 2021 that maybe this would be my last year. I didn’t want to be going into a year with some sort of … as a lame duck, like I said. I didn’t think that was fair to what I accomplished and what I mean to this team, and nothing really changed in that regard. I went into the offseason, that [it] could have been it.
