PACKERS CLUELESS IN MISTREATMENT OF RODGERS
By STEVE KING
Especially after watching the Browns, until just recently, totally mishandle their quarterback situation during the expansion era and how much it negatively affected the team, I am absolutely amazed – and that’s putting it mildly – at what the Green Bay Packers are doing to their franchise quarterback and future sure-fire Pro Football Hall of Famer, Aaron Rodgers.
To say they are mistreating and disrespecting him to the nth degree with their refusal to buy into him as their longtime starter, would be greatly understating it.
Do the Packers realize that Rodgers, as stated, is headed to the Hall of Fame someday?
Do the Packers realize that he won the NFL Most Valuable Player award last season?
Do the Packers realize how fortunate they have been for over the last quarter-century in being able to follow up one Hall of Fame quarterback in Brett Favre with another in Rodgers, and how incredibly rare that is in the NFL?
Do the Packers realize that quarterback is the most important position in team sports, and that if a team has a good one, like Rodgers, then it has a chance, and if it doesn’t, then it doesn’t?
Do the Packers realize how pedestrian the rest of their roster is, and that Rodgers is the only legitimate reason that the team is a Super Bowl contender annually?
Do the Packers remember how poorly the team did several years ago when it lost Rodgers for the season due to injury?
Do the Packers remember how pitiful the franchise was for the quarter-century between Hall of Fame quarterback Bart Starr’s retirement and the arrival of Favre?
Do the Packers realize that when a team has a great quarterback, it needs to do everything it can to help him and accommodate him, instead of treating him as if he were at the bottom of the roster, behind the third-string long-snapper and the third-string holder?
And do the Packers realize how stupid, clueless and dysfunctional they look to the rest of the football world?
HEY, PACKERS, TAKE A LOOK AT PITTSBURGH
If the Packers want to see how to handle a franchise, headed-to-the-Pro-Football-Hall-Fame-someday quarterback, especially one who is much, much closer to the end than he is to the beginning, then they need to look no further than to Pittsburgh, home of the Browns’ arch rivals, the Steelers.
They do a lot of things right in Pittsburgh, and their recent decision regarding quarterback Ben Roethlisberger is right at the very top of the list. After it seemed that they would have to part ways with the Findlay native because they couldn’t afford to pay him what he’s really worth, the Steelers were able to sit down with him and work out an agreement on a reduced contract to keep him in Pittsburgh for another run at a Super Bowl championship, and perhaps a last one with this current group of players.
The Steelers realized that they had to do this if they are to get to the big game. There was no other alternative – none. Visions of past Steelers failures at quarterback in Bubby Brister, Mark Malone, Tommy Maddox (who played the game of his life, far beyond what he or anyone else thought he would, in that stunning comeback to defeat the Browns in the 2002 wild-card playoffs), Neil O’Donnell and Kordell Stewart between the retirement of Hall of Famer Terry Bradshaw and the arrival of Roethlisberger two decades later, scared the front office enough to sign off on Big Ben.
Mason Rudolph? Or Rudolph Mason? Or whatever the heck his name is?
No, the Steelers are never going to get to where they want to go with that guy, and so, it was Roethlisberger or bust.
Are you watching this, Green Bay Packers?
If not, then you should be – for your own sake.
