Formed quite a connection with his coach in only one year.
Aaron Rodgers likely played his last game of his Hall of Fame-worthy NFL career on Monday, when the Pittsburgh Steelers lost to the Houston Texans in the AFC wild card round.
The legendary quarterback spent the majority of his professional football career with the Green Bay Packers, winning the Super Bowl in 2010 and four times being named the league’s Most Valuable Player.
He’s been named to the Pro Bowl 10 times in his 21 years in the league, led the NFL in passing yards in four different seasons, and holds the record for the highest career passer rating and the best career touchdown to interception ratio in a quarterback’s career.
In 2023, Green Bay drafted their quarterback of the future, Jordan Love, and traded Rodgers to the New York Jets, marking the first time in his career Rodgers had played for a team other than the Packers. But his tenure with the Jets didn’t exactly go well, because…well, they’re the Jets. He suffered an Achilles injury in the first game of the 2023 season that kept him out for the rest of the year, and in 2024 the team went 5-12 in a season that saw the Jets part ways with both head coach Robert Saleh and general manager Joe Douglas. (The Jets went 3-14 this season, so it doesn’t seem like they’ve fixed their problems just yet).
This past summer, Rodgers ended up signing with the Pittsburgh Steelers late in the offseason, for what many expected to be his final season in the league. Rodgers admitted as much, saying that he expected to retire after the 2025 season, but he proved that even at 42 years old he’s still got what it takes to be an NFL quarterback.
Rodgers led the Steelers to a 10-7 record in the regular season and an AFC North title before getting knocked out by the Texans in the opening round of the playoffs. And the next day, head coach Mike Tomlin dropped a bombshell and announced that he would be stepping down after 19 seasons in Pittsburgh, the longest-tenured coach in the NFL with a single team.
Despite only playing for him for one season though, it sounds like Rodgers formed quite a bond with Tomlin. In a behind-the-scenes look at the meeting with his team announcing his resignation, The Athletic reports that Rodgers was “sobbing” as he apologized for what he felt was his role in Tomlin leaving the team:
“Inside the team meeting room on Tuesday, Rodgers, through sobs, mustered a two-word message to deliver to his coach: “I’m sorry,” several players heard him say. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.””
It was clear even after the loss how much respect the quarterback had for his coach. During a press conference following the game, Rodgers delivered a passionate defense of Tomlin while blasting speculation that the coach was on the hot seat:
“I mean, this league has changed a lot in my 21 years. You know, when you hear a conversation about the Mike Tomlins of the world, Matt LaFleurs of the world, those are just two that kind of I’ve played for. And when I first got in the league, there wouldn’t be conversation about whether those guys were on the hot seat.
But the way that the league is covered now and the way that there’s snap decisions and the validity given to the Twitter experts and all the experts on TV now who make it seem like they know what the hell they’re talking about, to me that’s an absolute joke.
And for either of those two guys to be on the hot seat is really apropos of where we’re at as a society and a league, because obviously Matt’s done a lot of great things in Green Bay and we had a lot of success.
Mike T’s had more success than damn near anybody in the league for the last 19, 20 years. And more than that, though, when you have the right guy, and the culture is right, you don’t think about making a change. But there’s a lot of pressure that comes from the outside, and obviously that sways decisions from time to time. But it’s not how I would do things and not how the league used to be.”
And when he was asked again how he felt about Tomlin, Rodgers got heated and stormed out of the press conference:
It’s clear that Rodgers developed quite a bond with his coach in his single season in Pittsburgh.
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Aaron Rodgers Was Reportedly “Sobbing” When Former Pittsburgh Steelers Coach Mike Tomlin Told The Team He Was Resigning first appeared on
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