Aaron Rodgers announced on Wednesday that 2026 will be his last season in the NFL. The 42-year-old, four-time MVP signed a one-year deal to reunite with head coach Mike McCarthy in hopes of a last hurrah.
Rodgers called it a “full circle” moment to play for McCarthy for the first time since 2018.
That settled questions about how Rodgers viewed McCarthy after Tyler Dunne wrote a story for Bleacher Report in 2019 detailing friction between the quarterback and the coach that dated to earlier in their relationship. Rodgers indicated Wednesday that he is back in Pittsburgh only because McCarthy is the coach.
After Mike Tomlin’s departure, Rodgers said he suggested to General Manager Omar Khan that the Steelers consider McCarthy.
“I encouraged him for an outside perspective to interview Mike,” Rodgers said, via Brooke Pryor of ESPN. “Not thinking that he even would, honestly, just because the way the league goes and the trend, it’s kind of like whoever worked with Sean [McVay], Kyle [Shanahan] or one of those guys. Matt [LaFleur] now gets a lot of looks and multiple guys in those trees have.
“But then when it became more serious, I was thinking, ‘Wow, that’d be a really interesting thought to come back and play with Mike.’”
Rodgers has played for three teams over the past four seasons. He thought it was going to four in five seasons after Tomlin stepped away, admitting “there was some doubt [about a return to Pittsburgh] for sure.”
“When he said he was stepping away, that was an emotional moment just because we all love him so much and care about him, and I thought that was probably it for me in Pittsburgh,” Rodgers said. “But when the decision was made to hire Mike, I started opening my mind back up to coming back.”
Rodgers’ 22nd season will be his final season, absent a change of heart next offseason, giving him a final chance for a second Super Bowl ring. He and McCarthy won their only championship in the 2010 season.
The Packers have filled the opening in their personnel department that was created when Jon-Eric Sullivan left the team to become the Dolphins’ General Manager.
Milt Hendrickson has been promoted to vice president of player personnel, which was the title Sullivan held before heading to Miami. Hendrickson was the director-football operations and had been in that role for seven seasons.
The Packers also announced that John Wojciechowski has been named the new director-football operations along with several other promotions.
The other members of the organization with new titles are director of player personnel Richmond Williams, director of pro scouting Lee Gissendaner, senior player personnel executive Matt Malaspina, director of college scouting Pat Moore, senior national scout Sam Seale, national scout Luke Benuska, and assistant director of pro scouting Mike Owen.
The Packers are bringing in an undafted rookie with a back story that makes him easy to root for.
Marlon Jones, a cornerback from Vanderbilt who missed the 2024 season while batting cancer, is signing with the Packers, according to Matt Zenitz of CBS Sports.
Jones began his college career at Eastern Washington and was one of the best cornerbacks in the FCS before deciding to step up to a higher level of competition and transfer to Vanderbilt. But the day before he was going to move to Nashville in the spring of 2024, he received a diagnosis of stage 3 Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
That caused him to miss the 2024 season, but by 2025 he was in full remission and cleared to play. Although he didn’t make a big impact at Vanderbilt last year, he showed signs that with enough time to recover from the ordeal that cancer treatments put his body through, he may be able to play in the NFL.
Jones is a long shot to make the Packers’ regular-season roster, but he’ll be given that shot, two years after a diagnosis that forced him to put football on hold.
The news that Aaron Rodgers is officially back with the Steelers for his 22nd NFL season means he’ll continue to add to one of the most impressive statistical résumés any quarterback has ever assembled.
Of particular note is that Rodgers is likely to move ahead of Peyton Manning for the third-most touchdown passes in NFL history. Rodgers has thrown 527 touchdown passes in his NFL career, while Manning retired with 539, so Rodgers needs just 13 touchdown passes to move ahead of Manning. As long as Rodgers stays healthy, he should eclipse Manning’s career total early in the season.
Rodgers would likely need to play two more seasons to move into second place, which is currently occupied by Drew Brees, with 571 career touchdown passes. And Tom Brady’s all-time record of 649 career touchdown passes appears insurmountable.
Rodgers could also lose, a couple of of the career records he currently holds, however. At the moment, Rodgers is tied for the highest career passer rating in NFL history: Rodgers and Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson both have a passer rating of 102.2. But last year Jackson’s passer rating was 103.8 and Rodgers’ was 94.8, so if they both play at the same level in 2026, Jackson will take first place in the record books all to himself.
Rodgers could also fall behind Joe Burrow (101.1) and Patrick Mahomes (100.8), who are currently third and fourth in NFL history in career passer rating. The best career passer rating is a record Rodgers likely won’t hold by the end of the season.
Another career record Rodgers could lose is the all-time lowest interception percentage. Rodgers has thrown 123 interceptions in 8,743 career passes, a career interception rate of 1.41 percent. Rodgers is just barely ahead of Cardinals quarterback Jacoby Brissett, who has a career interception rate of 1.42 percent, and not far ahead of Justin Herbert at 1.7 percent and Burrow and Mahomes at 1.8 percent.
Ultimately, the numbers Rodgers puts up this season, when he’ll turn 43 years old, won’t matter a lot to his legacy. He’s an all-time great regardless of what he does this season. But his career numbers will change, and perhaps not entirely for the better.
When the league first deliberately leaked the possibility of staging a game on the night before Thanksgiving, it should have been obvious that it was happening. To make it happen, however, the NFL had to think outside the officially-licensed wine box.
With the ban on televising Friday night and Saturday games still in effect in November, the league couldn’t have the two Wednesday-before-Thanksgiving teams play on the preceding Saturday. The only option was to pick two teams emerging from their annual bye week.
As explained once that possibility (or probability . . . or inevitability) hit the radar screen, this limits the bye for the two teams that get the Thanksgiving Eve assignment. For the Packers, who played at New Orleans the following Sunday, they’ll have more down time after their post-bye game than before it. The Rams, who host the Chiefs the ensuing Thursday night, will have a truncated bye, eight days off, and then the usual mini-bye following a Thursday night game. (That will give the Rams extra time to prepare for their rematch with the 49ers, which surely went over well with San Francisco coach Kyle Shanahan.)
Still, both the Packers and the Rams won’t have the usual, full-blown, once-per-year bye week. They’ll play 10 days (not 14 days) after their last game before the week off.
This will complicate the planning for their Thanksgiving Eve game. Under the labor deal, players must have at least four straight days off during the bye week.
Here’s the relevant portion of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, from Article 24, Section 2: “During any regular season bye week period occurring during the term of this Agreement, players will be given a minimum of four consecutive days off. Such four-day period must include a Saturday and a Sunday unless the Club is scheduled to play a game on the Thursday following the bye week, in which case players may be required to report to the Club on the Sunday preceding the Thursday game. In such an event, the four-day period shall be Wednesday through Saturday. Any injured player may be required to undergo medical or rehabilitation treatment during such four-day period provided that such treatment is deemed reasonably necessary by the Club’s medical staff.”
The CBA, as written, doesn’t contemplate teams being scheduled to play on the Wednesday after the bye week. The most obvious adjustment would be to give the players Tuesday through Friday off, with a return to work on the Saturday before the Wednesday game.
If that’s how it goes, the players who are supposed to get a weekend off won’t even get one day from their bye-week weekend off. They’ll have their four-day break during the week, and they’ll be back to work on Saturday morning, with Saturday essentially becoming the first day of the traditional in-season preparation cycle for Sunday games. (In weeks with Sunday games, the practices usually happen on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. For a Wednesday game after the bye, the primary work days could be be Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.)
It’s currently unclear whether the NFL and NFL Players Association worked out a side deal to modify Article 24, Section 2. Ideally, the league would have gotten permission to deviate from the settled terms of the CBA before setting the game. If that didn’t happen, there’s a ready-fire-aim quality to the effort to find yet another standalone window.
At this point, whether the league secured advance authority to shrink the post-bye period doesn’t matter. The game has been set — and, more importantly, the right to televise the game has been awarded to Netflix. The overriding question becomes the windows that both the Packers and Rams players will have for their mandatory four-day break.
For everyone on the outside, it doesn’t matter. For the players and their teams, it’s an important question. Will there be a “normal” workweek before the post-bye game, or will the players be back on Sunday for a truncated stretch of preparation for the first-ever game on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving?
If the question wasn’t addressed before the new window was selected and sold, it’s a question that needs to be resolved in the aftermath of the official schedule release.
