If he was doing something health related and/or was "good for the team", I highly doubt Saleh would have made a point to say that whatever Rodgers is doing is "inexcused" (Saleh's words, not mine). He merely would have said "Aaron will be gone for football reasons and it is considered an excused absence, not subject to fines."
You took the words right out of my mouth. Saleh would have bent over backwards for an excuse to excuse Lord Aaron and avoid the distraction.
While I agree with you and how the call between Rodgers and Saleh went, what other choice did Saleh have? "If you go, I am cutting you"? Rodgers put his coach and his team in a no win situation. Rodgers isn't a rookie, he's been doing this a long time, he should know not to schedule stuff (sounds like a trip) when it is more than likely to interfere with his job.
Kind of almost reminds me of when Favre went to Minnesota and humiliated Chidlress by disregarding his coach's position, making it clear it was Favre's team, not Childress. Rodgers didn't do Saleh any favors with this stunt.
I just wouldn't be surprised if he retires. And I wouldn't be surprised if he shows up either. Rodgers has always danced to his own music. Thank god he's not our problem anymore.
On this one, I have to disagree. I don't believe his ego and his pride would allow him to retire right now. He's too obsessed with proving to the world that he's a football god, and that obsession won't allow him to **** away the last and only chance he'll ever have to prove it.
He won't "technically" quit at this point, but I suspect you're half right - part of him has already quit on his team, and on his teammates. And if we're both right about that, we'll see it more and more over the next several months.
No. He is still getting most of that.
But it is more important than his team.
But what sticks in my craw about this is that the fact that he's getting paid almost 40 million dollars to do his job to the best of hs ability is evidently not as important to him as his
obligation to his teammates and to the people who are paying him all that money. Not a dime of whoch he even earmed last season, but he cashed the checks anyway.
I automatically look back to my last job, the last job I was hired to do by someone else. The job I retired from at the start of the pandemic, the last job where someone gave me a paycheck every week, in return for which I was expected to accomplish tasks for them. I was the operations manager for an organiztion of over 100 employees., and it came with a lot of responsibility and a lot of expectations and trust. For which I was fairly compensated, IMO.
If I needed to take time off for some sort of personl reason, I did it. Obviously not often, but things come up. I worked hard, and didn't feel any guilt about taking a day or two off for some family emergency or even important life event.
But....
If i'd had some sort of accident which required me to take essentially a full year off from my job (and my employer still paid me my full salary during that period), and then
just when I was finally getting back to resuming my duties, some sort of personal event came up that would require me to miss some very important planning meetings or whatever.... things that really could not be made up later... there would have been
nothing more important to me than being at those meetings and making a supreme, even superhuman effort to give my organization back some of the things that they had been paying me for over the last year but that I was not there to do. I'd have spent the
entire next year doing everything I could think of to earn the money they'd been paying me while I was not there.
But not Rodgers. He apparently doesn't think that way; never enters his mind. Because, he
personally did not see any way he'd benefit from being there.
I hardly even know what to say about the way I think of that.
There were always a few Rodgers apologist here that said he didn't need to attend Packer OTA's because he knew the playbook inside and out and had been with the Packers for a long time, etc. Basically, nothing new for him to learn.
And that's Rodgers, right there. All of him. Me, me, memememememe.
First of all, what he never, ever could begin to comprehend is that it was not about what "
he had to learn" - at least, not just about that. It was about giving his young teammates, who were struggling to make the team and trying desperately to learn everything they could and make a good impression, to learn a few things from him - ther veteran quarterback, their team leader, the future hall of famer they'd been watching on TV ever since they were kids. It was
their chance to learn something new to
them, that might make them better players and give them a better chance to contribute.
And it was a chance to confer with his coaches, the team managers who were charged with evaluating talent, and share his thoughts, opinions, and suggestions on those kids - "I like the way number 84 gets separation, but I noticed that when he's got his man beat, he seems to start focusing more on catching the ball than on continuing his route. Might have gotten away with that at Michigan State, but at this level it gives the defender a chance to recover and get back into the play. That needs work".
Or whatever. Any one of a milllion things that one of the best quarterbacks who ever played the game could spot in the course of a play, but that a coach on the sideline might not see. But still
needs to know about when evaluating players.
And second, theer are things he coukd and needs to learn in every mini-camp. He needs to know who his receivers are, what they are and are not capable of, what he needs to do (and can do) to mesh with him. He's famous for not fully trusting his rookie receivers, and just plain flatout refusing to throw them the ball in case they drop it... maybe if he'd spent a few more weeks each summer meeting these kids, working with them, telling them that if there was anything they needed to know they should come and ask him, he might have established productive rapports with his receiver corps. And maybe even not had such a terrible postseaon record.