Can Aaron Rodgers Be the Type of Leader the Packers Need?

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Updated: November 18, 2016

GREEN BAY, Wisc. — Roaring boos filled the house of Curly and Lombardi and Reggie and Favre on the night of November 6. Give your team’s “owners” a diet of New Glarus Spotted Cow beer, bratwursts and abhorrent football, and of course they’ll turn on you.

It was a damning scene. Fans even booed their beloved CEO, a player whose name can be mentioned in the same breath as those past greats.

Aaron Rodgers, Mr. R-E-L-A-X himself, knows that this is no time for relaxing.

His words have had bite these days. He has sounded irritated. Disgusted, even.

In a zipped-up gray hoodie, Rodgers stepped to the podium after the Packers’ 31-26 loss to the Colts and shredded his team’s lack of urgency.

Players must look themselves in the mirror, he said, because this effort was “unacceptable.”

Never mind the fact Rodgers rarely interacted with teammates during the game. The atmosphere on the sideline? Lifeless.

When asked to assess his own play at this midway point of the season, Rodgers noted that someone other than himself needs to score a rushing touchdown.

One week later, the Titans flogged the Packers, 47-25.

Rodgers had another pointed message.

“There has to be that healthy fear as a player,” he said, “that if you don’t do your job, they’ll get rid of you.”

Here’s the harsh reality for the 4-5 Packers: They’re an ordinary team guided by an ordinary quarterback.

Give yourself paralysis by analysis studying all the factors around No. 12. Injuries. Personnel whiffs. Stale coaching. The fact remains this is a two-time MVP, a $100 million investment, a player who’ll have a street named after him in Brown County one day.

Aaron Rodgers cannot be ordinary. He must be extraordinary. He must be the one holding the lantern, leading the way, out of this abyss.

Can he be the type of leader the Packers need right now? This season, his season, is on the brink Sunday against the Redskins. Pressure is building with 52 sets of eyes all staring right back at Rodgers in this locker room.

He’s the one who has seemed so immortal for so long. Rodgers declined an interview request, yet those in his orbit paint the picture of a complex man. A chameleon.

This is a teammate so loyal, he texted “Happy Birthday” to a former third-string tight end who caught nine passes in Green Bay. Said D.J. Williams, “He cares about guys on his team.”

This is also a teammate who never gave his cellphone number to Jermichael Finley, the starting tight end, through six seasons together.

This is a friend who’ll join offensive linemen for Thursday night dinners and dress up as a Jedi for defensive tackle Letroy Guion’s Halloween bash at Bleu Restaurant in De Pere.

This is also a son and brother who hasn’t spoken to his family in two years.

This is an MJ-level, cold-blooded assassin of a competitor who brings Super Bowl intensity to two-minute drills at practice. This isn’t someone who’ll inspire the masses with a Braveheart battle cry in the locker room.

Players here at 1265 Lombardi Ave.—right across the street from a mural of Rodgers painted on a fence—wholeheartedly believe.

“He is the leader of this team,” Guion said. “We go as he goes. That’s the reality of it. He’s the quarterback. He’s the superstar.”

“There’s no one else who can do what he can do,” left tackle David Bakhtiari added. “He’s Aaron Rodgers for a reason.”

Then there’s Finley, assuring Rodgers is no leader.

“In my opinion, he’s a different guy,” Finley said. “I didn’t really know how he showed his leadership. He wasn’t a vocal guy. He really wasn’t a hands-on guy. To tell you the truth, it was all about his game and his stats in my opinion. … He was a guy that kept it all in. He kept grudges close to his chest. If you did something, he never really let it go. He always kept it close to his heart.

“I just don’t think he was a natural-born leader. He wasn’t put on Earth to lead.”

The Packers better hope he was.

He’s the mercurial master, the Obi-Wan Kenobi of this team inching toward collapse.

The relationship was doomed.

Quarterback and Tight End could not be any more different.

Rodgers is extremely detailed. He needs routes run a certain way—to the step, to a science, to the split-second. Finley? He’d rather freestyle. He’d rather take an eraser to that whiteboard scattered with X’s and O’s and play backyard football.

They were barely cordial co-workers, let alone friends. Finley didn’t even know where Rodgers lived in Green Bay.

Many days, he said, they’d pass each other in the hallway without saying a word.

Hang out together? Please. “We didn’t hang out a half a time,” Finley said.

So 2008 flipped to 2009…to 2010…to 2011…to 2012, with no substantive changes to their rocky relationship.

Then midway through 2012, Mike McCarthy hatched a plan. The head coach had Rodgers and Finley meet on Saturday nights at the team hotel for 30-45 minutes. It was McCarthy’s idea, Finley noted, and admittedly “awkward.” But finally they learned more about each other. Their families. Finley’s kids. As they dissected the game plan together, the invisible wall between the two started to crack.

Six games into the 2013 season, the tight end suffered a career-ending neck injury. The hit still haunts him. The fact he couldn’t find a rapport with Rodgers sooner? That haunts him more.

This relationship should not have been doomed.

“I feel like I wasted a ton of years,” he said, “because of awkward situations.”

Rodgers is the first to acknowledge he’s no rah-rah leader. That “Not here, not ever!” State Farm ad is an exaggerated caricature of the man.

He attacks his profession like a maniac, a savant, “a wizard,” Guion says, and then it’s on everyone else to match his drive to achieve optimal success. Some teammates interpret this as aloof and distant. Others interpret this as raising the bar to a level no other team can.

Finley points to Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Cam Newton and even Jameis Winston as quarterbacks who lead vocally. That’s what he wanted in Green Bay. A quarterback who’ll laugh, scream and cry right there with every player. A quarterback who’ll at least text him to shoot the bull.

“But Aaron Rodgers is so scared of what guys are going to say that he doesn’t say nothing at all,” Finley said. “He doesn’t get vocal. He goes into his little shell. He’s not a guy who hangs out with the fellas. He’s real self-centered.”

Echoing the likes of retired receiver Greg Jennings before him, Finley calls Rodgers “very sensitive.”

“If he’s joking with a guy and the guy comes back at him, he doesn’t take it too well,” Finley said. “Because of what position he’s in, he thinks guys are supposed to bow down to him I guess.”

Others do see a born leader. To Williams, Rodgers is sensitive but in a more comical way. He doesn’t …

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