The Super Bowl champion quarterback of my family’s favorite football team was traded yesterday, ending the chance he’d finish his career wearing the same uniform he wore to start it. After eighteen years, and after fifteen seasons as the starter, each long enough to raise an entire human child to some marker of adulthood, Aaron Rodgers is no longer a Green Bay Packer.
“And I feel fine.”
It’s impossible, for me, to compare this to the Brett Favre trade. I was thirteen years old when that happened. Sports were different for me. The world was different. It was easier for Favre to hold his identity as an aw-shucks warrior in a universe where he didn’t have the temptation of befriending snake-oil selling podcasters. That isn’t to equate Favre with Rodgers—Favre was always more at home culturally Wisconsin, and Favre was already a father by the time he got to Green Bay, making his lifestyle naturally different—but it does leave me wondering how much of the difference in emotion is Rodgers, and how much of the difference is my age, and how much of the difference is how internet blooms have changed our consumption of sports.
Mostly, I think it’s just that Rodgers is just spectacularly weird.
For the last half of Aaron Rodgers’s time in Green Bay, he acted like a middle schooler who’s realized that 1) they don’t care about class and 2) there’s no real incentive for them to behave. He spoke his mind. He leaned into personal accolades. He got weirder and weirder and weirder. Some of it was refreshing. There’s something unique still about an athlete considering their job only part of their life. Some of it was infuriating. Maybe he would have cited his Super Bowl victories if he’d had multiple and they’d been recent, but his frequent references to his MVP awards these last few years were grating. Like the middle schooler, you could always see where Aaron Rodgers was coming from. There was always a through-line visible from the words back to coherent thoughts. Having been conditioned to love the guy—he was one of the best quarterbacks of all time playing football for my favorite team, for God’s sake—it was easy to encourage parts, and it was easy to laugh parts off, and it wouldn’t have been the biggest problem that he cared so much about his own accolades if he’d just also seemed to care about the Packers. When he seemed to stop caring about the Packers these last few years, though, things changed. I think that’s what makes the reaction so numb. The distance grew so wide so gradually that it was like he’d already moved out. Jordan Love is right there, ready for a chance to prove himself. The trade return was really good. The Jets aren’t in any way a direct threat to the Packers’ future. Athletes leaving get cast into family and relationship metaphors, but those don’t apply well here. The allegory here is one of watching a once-favorite character written out of a TV show. It’s just time.
One family metaphor, though, before we move on because I don’t have anything funny to say about this and I hopefully have funny things to say about other stuff:
We said last month that one way to understand Aaron Rodgers is to view him as Jordan Rodgers’s brother. By this, we didn’t mean that Aaron is a response to Jordan. Instead, we mean that Aaron is very much like Jordan. They’re both just…off. It’s gross to psychoanalyze athletes on a personal level, but we’re all doing it, so let’s say it out loud: Aaron Rodgers has some weird relational stuff going on. He seems to seek out rejection, and when rejection isn’t there, he cuts the ties himself. This is what he seems to have done to the Green Bay Packers.
Why don’t so many of us feel a thing right now, as our favorite team’s best quarterback moves on? Because there’s not a lot to feel. Had he wanted to finish his career in a Packer uniform, we would have wanted that too. But since he didn’t, how could we?
Well Maybe the Lakers Should Just Wear Cups
Here we go. This is fun. Desmond Bane kept the hitting–Lakers–in–the–dick streak going.
This is very NBA. Which is to say: Nobody hit anybody in the dick here, but everyone is reacting as though they did, because everyone heard the Grizzlies hit someone else in the dick, and a lot of people weren’t watching, but those people took it and ran with it even though Bane was just doing the normal basketball thing there of trying to draw contact.
Imagine for a second that Desmond Bane, attempting to both score on and draw a foul from Anthony Davis, also conceived in that split-second of a third goal: “I would like to elbow this man in the naughty bits.” Imagine having the mental capacity to do all of that. He’s driving against a guy five inches taller than him, it’s a tight spot in a must-win playoff game, the big man is among the most gifted in recent basketball history, and he has space in his mind for an additional concern. Perhaps some players, this logic seems to go, would consider their reading list or contemplate what they saw on their trip to the Getty Villa on the off day. Desmond Bane, though? He was thinking nutshot. It’s so silly. Of course he wasn’t trying to hit Anthony Davis in the nuts. Which brings us back to the cup idea. If you don’t like it, Anthony…
I was bummed about the Grizzlies losing last night, and not just because Bane is an NIT legend. I was bummed because I don’t really like LeBron James, and he played quite well despite his elderly status. I won’t go down the HGH hole. I won’t go down the HGH hole. I promised myself I wouldn’t go down the HGH hole today.
Jimmy Butler
Oh thank God.
Here’s a comparison: If LeBron James is like Aaron Rodgers, a product of the social media age, and if Brett Favre aligns with Michael Jordan in this scenario (for both Rodgers and Favre, let’s make clear this is just within the Packers organization and not within football as a whole), Jimmy Butler comes from the Favre/Jordan school. Which is to say: Jimmy Butler makes you feel things.
One response to The Last Dance, and I don’t remember who said it but I’m guessing it was multiple people, is that greatness isn’t a measure of ability so much as it’s a measure of how a performer made you feel. This is the key difference between LeBron and Michael Jordan. LeBron James is a dork with outrageous physical gifts and a big enough desire to be liked that it propelled him to unseen heights. Michael Jordan was great.
Jimmy Butler, last night, was great.
People forget that before Jimmy Butler scored 56 points in Game 4 to push the best player in the NBA to the brink of first round elimination as a 1-seed, he was questionable with a bruise on his bottom. The man was playing hurt. He was also playing with a fraction of his roster, and he was also down 15 towards the end of the third quarter, a point at which my dumb (not bruised) ass said to myself, “Man, maybe Spoelstra should rest him.” I’m an idiot! That fourth quarter was awesome!
It’s good the Bucks have Grayson Allen, because otherwise they’d be a really likable team, and this would feel a little bad. Instead, they not only have Grayson Allen but also have already won a title with Giannis, making it very easy to just immerse oneself in the Jimmy Butler experience and pretend oneself has always been a Jimmy Butler fan and that oneself was never a Bulls fan and oneself shudders at the thought. The Bulls? Who are they? I thought they got contracted at the end of the 2014–2015 season. Also, can we say Shaka Smart coached Jimmy Butler at Marquette? That would be convenient for me.
NIT History: Flavor Flav
Let me show you a picture, and then let me tell you a story.
Flavor Flav loves the NIT.
I don’t know about the last part, actually. But as we start telling you daily (on weekdays) stories of NITs past, it seemed fitting to start with the year I attended my first NIT Final Four. Also in attendance? The most legendary hype man around.
To be fully honest with you, Flavor Flav might not love the NIT. He had a cousin on the Penn State team in the form of guard Shep Garner, who hit 19 threes over Penn State’s five NIT games in 2018, the year they won it. Shep Garner might not have been that team’s best player—Tony Carr got drafted—but he was a senior leader, and the man could score. Super fun shooter. Also, Flavor Flav’s cousin. Which translated into Garner hitting a three and Madison Square Garden erupting (great crowd that night) and the jumbotron showing Flavor Flav performing his trade, which is getting people hype.
Where is Garner today? He’s the director of video operations at FGCU, reunited with Pat Chambers. He played a season in the G-League for Grand Rapids, then played in Mexico for a moment before Covid started and ended that season. From there, he went back to Chester, PA and took an assistant coaching job at Chester High School, twenty minutes away from Roman Catholic High School, where he’d starred back in the day.
Where is Flavor Flav? Flavor Flav is everywhere, my friend. And he is always right on time.
Burnley Tries to Win It All
Burnley is underway right now at Blackburn, Burnley’s archrival. If the Clarets (that’s Burnley) win, they’ll be the champions of the Championship, the highest honor I can imagine in what our ancestors called football. If the Clarets (still Burnley) lose or tie, they’ll have to wait at least one more day to take the crown, and possibly even longer.
It’s a great moment, one that looked possible at this point last year (because Burnley was about to be relegated) but far from assured (because Burnley hadn’t quite been relegated yet, and because winning just about any league is hard to do). It’s a milestone for the club, a chance at the first Championship championship since 2016 and the eighth championship of any kind in the club’s history (they’ve got two Premier League titles or the equivalent, two other Championship titles or the equivalent, one each at League One and League Two or the equivalent, and one FA Cup). It’s also an excited moment. Vincent Kompany’s got the team good, and Vincent Kompany’s expected to stick around next year, reportedly turning down Tottenham and Chelsea because you can’t top a champion.
Personally, it’s mostly just fun. There are a lot of Burnley fans out there who didn’t become Burnley fans because they were looking for the most irrelevant team in the Premier League in the summer of 2019. I think they should celebrate this moment more than me. But at the same time: This is cool. And it would be especially cool to win it at Blackburn in legendary shithouser Ashley Barnes’s last game with the lads. Up ‘em, as they say.*
*I don’t know if they say this.
