Mike McCarthy has answered enough Aaron Rodgers’ questions to last a lifetime. He was asked more on Tuesday at the NFL owners meetings in Scottsdale, Arizona.
But the Steelers head coach still doesn’t have an answer from the quarterback about his playing future.
“I’m confident,” McCarthy said. “But at the end of the day, it’s a personal decision. I think we’re in a good space.”
McCarthy and Rodgers talk regularly, most recently on Monday night.
“He says hello,”’ McCarthy quipped.
Rodgers is expected to return for a second season in Pittsburgh, his 22nd season in the NFL and his 14th with McCarthy as his coach. Like last offseason, though, Rodgers is taking his sweet time.
McCarthy said he was not going to “get into the timeline,” but it seems like McCarthy knows which way the wind is blowing already.
“It’s going good,” McCarthy said. “It’s been very positive, and we’ll just continue to talk. We talk regularly.”
The Steelers, for a second consecutive offseason, are Rodgers’ only option. He will either sign with Pittsburgh or retire.
Steelers head coach Mike McCarthy is speaking regularly with the person he hopes will be his starting quarterback in 2026.
McCarthy said on Monday that he has been in regular communication with Aaron Rodgers throughout the offseason. It’s still not clear whether Rodgers, a free agent, will sign with the Steelers, but McCarthy described his conversations with Rodgers as productive.
“Just like they always are, life, football, so what’s going on at the facility,” McCarthy said, via Steelers.com. “Really engaged into what’s going on. I would just say he’s in a very positive space. We’ll just continue to engage in conversations. We’ve been talking weekly, every couple of days, so we’ll just continue to do that.”
McCarthy coached Rodgers in Green Bay from 2006 to 2018. They won a Super Bowl together, and Rodgers was twice named NFL Most Valuable Player during his years playing for McCarthy. The two still have a good relationship.
“The personal part of it will always be the same,” said McCarthy. “Football guys, they talk about the past. We talked about plays in 2010. We’re talking a lot of football, his experience in Pittsburgh. We talk a lot about football and just where he is in his life right now.”
Right now, Rodgers is not a Steeler. McCarthy hopes he will be soon.
The NFL is struggling to balance the P.R. and legal realities of diversity in key positions with a potential political assault from those who regard the three-letter “DEI’ acronym as a four-letter word. Through it all, the results speak for themselves.
Exhibit A? The 2026 photo of the NFL’s head coaches. Exhibit B? The 2026 photo of the NFL’s General Managers.
Falcons G.M. Ian Cunningham, whose promotion from assistant G.M. in Chicago somehow didn’t result in the Bears receiving a pair of third-round compensatory picks, addressed the situation on Monday, in comments to David Brandt of the Associated Press.
“Just from my position, especially being a Black man, there’s still work to be done,” Cunningham told Brandt. “Now that I’m in this position and have this platform, I’m going to be intentional about what we do from a grassroots effort to a director level. . . . I do think it’s important to give people of all races and sexes a chance to be in a position to further their career.”
Cunningham’s comments come only days after Florida took aim at the Rooney Rule as discriminatory against white men, and in the aftermath of Steelers owner Art Rooney II acknowledging that “the environment has changed.”
The environment has changed, at the national level and in plenty of states. The law has not. And the NFL’s historical performance as it relates to the hiring of coaches and General Managers — coupled with the league’s decision more than 20 years ago to make interviews of minority candidates for the most coveted positions mandatory — shows that the longstanding legal standard has not been met.
The problem is that there has been no real accountability. And the irony is that the first governmental effort to enforce the law comes from the perspective of the demographic that has benefited from the league’s traditional hiring practices.
The league undoubtedly hopes the Florida problem will go away. That the demand made by Florida attorney general James Uthmeier to abandon the Rooney Rule as to the Dolphins, Jaguars, and Buccaneers is more performative than substantive.
Whatever Uthmeier’s motivations and intentions, the NFL should do the right thing. Don’t run. Don’t hide. Stand up and say, in a clear, loud voice, “Bring it on.”
Would that be good for business? Probably not. But doing the right thing isn’t always good for business. The truest test of an organization’s true character is whether it will do the right thing when it could be bad for business.
Will Aaron Rodgers be back with the Steelers in 2026?
The door still seems to be wide open for the 42-year-old quarterback, who helped lead Pittsburgh to the postseason in 2025 and now would be reuniting with his former head coach, Mike McCarthy.
It’s just a matter of Rodgers letting the Steelers know his plans.
To that point, team owner Art Rooney II said on Sunday that he’s expecting to have Rodgers’ answer before the draft begins — in Pittsburgh — on April 23.
“I still expect that,” Rooney told Gerry Dulac of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Sunday at the annual league meeting in Arizona. “I expect we’ll get an answer before the draft.
“When I talked to him and Omar [Khan] talked to him, he told us he wasn’t going to take as long this year as he did last year [to make a decision],” Rooney added. “I’m not 100 percent sure what that means, but I expect something before the draft.”
As noted by Dulac, the Steelers believe Rodgers’ decision will come down to retirement or returning to Pittsburgh for another season.
Rodgers completed 65.7 percent of his passes for 3,322 yards with 24 touchdowns and seven interceptions for the Steelers, helping the club go 10-7 and win the AFC North. But the postseason loss to the Texans was ugly, with Rodgers finishing the contest 17-of-33 for 146 yards with one interception. He also took four sacks.
Pittsburgh currently has Mason Rudolph and Will Howard on their roster at quarterback.
After Florida attorney James Uthmeier posted a video on Wednesday demanding that the NFL suspend the Rooney Rule, the team owned by the man after whom the rule is named had no comment.
On Friday, Steelers owner Art Rooney II — the son of Dan Rooney, the namesake of the Rooney Rule — had a comment.
“There’s no question that the environment has changed in recent years,” Rooney told Kalyn Kahler of ESPN. “We do have an obligation to make sure that our policies comply with the laws, whatever the law is, and whatever the changes in law might be. We’ve got to look at that and make sure we’re in compliance. . . . That’s just the environment we’re existing in today.”
The laws haven’t changed. The attitude toward them has. No state attorney general has ever investigated the NFL for decades of questionable hiring practices when it comes to race. Now, out of the blue, a red-state attorney general is attacking the Rooney Rule as being discriminatory on the basis of race.
Rooney’s comments have relevance far beyond Florida. They explain the NFL’s tiptoeing through the DEI minefield, dumping the Accelerator program last year before bringing it back in 2026 and expanding it to include white candidates.
The NFL has tried to strike the balance between saying all the right things and doing as little as possible. Now, the league is faced with a dilemma. Paying lip service to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts has invited an attack from Florida. What the NFL does from here could invite a social-media assault from one specific location in Washington, D.C.
It also could spark an effort by a blue-state attorney general or two to pluck low-hanging fruit that has been hanging there for decades.
