Aaron Rodgers Is All Fucked Up

Try as he did, Aaron Rodgers was not able to avoid having his own Brett Favre Moment. Any 41-year-old quarterback with decreasing mobility takes a big risk by participating in an NFL game, and on Sunday Rodgers's age caught up with him all at once.

The Steelers were nursing a 7–3 lead as the second half of their game against Buffalo got underway, and the plug was pulled after one play. Rodgers, playing with a broken left wrist that kept him out of the previous game, fumbled the ball after getting blind-side smashed by Joey Bosa on the Steelers' first snap of the half, and the Bills took a 10–7 lead when Christian Benford scooped up the loose ball and returned it for a touchdown. While the Steelers were losing the lead for good, Rodgers was reeling on the turf, blood dripping from the bridge of his nose.

Rodgers had to come out of the game for a bit, and stood on the sideline looking like a guy who owes his bookie money while Mason Rudolph ended the Steelers' next drive with an interception. Rodgers got back out there for the next two drives, and finished the game having taken nine sacks while throwing for just 117 yards. The Steelers lost, 26–7, and are now at great risk of choking away a division title that was there for the taking.

Boos rang out in the stadium during the second half, as well as chants to fire head coach Mike Tomlin. This is not the future the Steelers imagined for themselves when they signed Rodgers in the offseason. He was supposed to add enough zip to the offense to finally turn Tomlin's permanently 10–7 team into one with real ambition, but with the way things are going now the Steelers would be lucky to suffer another dispiriting first-round exit.

There was a funny dramatic tension to Rodgers's postgame press conference, which the reporters in the room seemingly designed to give Rodgers opportunities to do his favorite thing: blame other people for his problems whenever things are going poorly. Rodgers was onto them, though! He batted away a question about Tomlin's decision-making ("I know what you're trying to ask, and I'm not going to go down that road at all"), and then wriggled out of a line of questioning about players taking accountability ("Who said it was an issue? I never said that"). But alas, Rodgers couldn't quite make it to the finish line without sneering at his teammates. The last question of the press conference was about how Rodgers and his receivers can get on the same page and stop mixing up routes. You could see Rodgers fighting a smirk as he answered:

When there's film sessions, everybody shows up. And when I check to a route, do the right route, you know?

Ah, there's our guy. The problem isn't that Rodgers is basically a sentient tackling dummy at this point in his career, or that Tomlin has no good ideas. It's that Jonnu Smith can't understand Rodgers's arcane system of pre-snap hand signals. Everything would be fine if the Steelers would just trade for Allen Lazard already.