The start of free agency came and went. The draft. Now organized team activities. Surely, Aaron Rodgers can’t skip an entire offseason and just show up for Pittsburgh Steelers training camp.
Right?
Right?
Well, we’re about to find out. But it’s looking like we should have taken the message very seriously back in April, when just a few days before the start of the NFL Draft, both head coach Mike Tomlin and general manager Omar Khan suggested the quarterback room didn’t need to be complete until late July.
“We go to camp with four quarterbacks,” Khan told reporters on April 23. “Right now we have two on the roster. All options are on the table in how we acquire those last two. I assure you we’ll have four when we get to [training camp in] Latrobe.”
Added Tomlin in that same media conference: “In general, when you report to training camp, that’s a line of demarcation for development of a group individually and collectively.”
With a Rodgers signing seemingly nowhere on the radar in the midst of Pittsburgh’s organized team activities — and with a full squad minicamp just around the corner on June 10 — it may not have been a coincidence that both Khan and Tomlin both pointed at training camp when it came to locking in the quarterback room. Indeed, that might have been the plan all along, with Rodgers having visited with the Steelers and presumably explained his offseason intentions on March 21.
Looking back now, it stands to reason that if a Rodgers signing and a planned attendance in the June minicamp were definitively on the table, both Tomlin and Khan would have pointed to that event as some kind of artificial deadline. Instead, both pointed at training camp. And in the process, they assured Rodgers all the wiggle room he desired when it came to actually getting onto a football field with the Steelers.
That doesn’t mean Rodgers absolutely won’t sign in the next few days and then show up for what is arguably the most important three days of chemistry building in the offseason. But what it absolutely does mean is that Pittsburgh freed Rodgers up to be Rodgers — free of deadlines and, to use his own words from this offseason, “open to everything and not specifically attached to anything.”
Of course, when you take that kind of latitude into June, it can lead to some white-knuckling in the fan base, not to mention some critical commentary from some of the Steelers fraternity (see: Terry Bradshaw and Ryan Clark). It also fuels some conspiracy theories that Rodgers is continuing to slow play a signing in a manner that allows the Minnesota Vikings get ample looks at J.J. McCarthy and potentially change their mind about their 2025 quarterback plans. If that sounds like league speculation, it’s because that’s exactly what it is. But that’s what you get when the outside world is looking in and wondering what exactly is going on with Rodgers’ commitment to playing another season.
Perhaps most interesting in all this? If Rodgers does indeed end up skipping everything until the start of training camp, his own words will once again come back to bite him. Because it was Rodgers who showed up for the New York Jets’ organized team activities in the 2023 offseason, reasoning the decision as one necessary to let teammates know how he operates and communicates. That’s all captured on a May 23, 2023 news conference that is still up on the Jets' team website, encapsulating a smiling, seemingly jovial Rodgers — blissfully unaware of being on the doorstep of the worst two-season span of his career.
Asked by a reporter why it was important for him to be in attendance and working with the team at Jets OTAs, Rodgers pointed definitively at the feeling-out-process that is natural with a new team and new offense.
“[W]ith a new offense, being my first year here, I really wanted to be around for at least some of the beginning things to just let them know kind of how I like to do things,” Rodgers told reporters. “Like I said, some of the code words, some of the little adjustments, some of the ways I see the game — sparking that conversation. … Just being here with [the offensive coordinator] to help him put the offense in.”
Two years later, Rodgers hasn’t taken part in any of that with his presumed next NFL team — taking the time away to deal with some personal issues in his life. Whether that will extend beyond minicamp is anyone’s guess at this point. But given how Rodgers framed his first interactions with the Jets, skipping full squad minicamp would take the process of chemistry-building that he once thought was important enough to begin in May and move it all the way to late July.
As league standards go, that’s pushing it — harkening back to the days when Brett Favre’s retirement musings held the Green Bay Packers in limbo through parts of two offseasons, and in 2009, when Favre waited until August 18 to sign with the Minnesota Vikings. It’s hard to fathom the Steelers stomaching that kind of trek to get Rodgers under contract and then onto the field. Then again, the head coach and general manager have already opened the door to waiting until late July if it comes to it.
That makes this Rodgers’ world, with the clocks running on his schedule. To lean on the words of Steeler’s owner Art Rooney II, it’s a reality Pittsburgh will have to live with “a little while longer.” And then maybe longer than that.