The fact that Aaron Rodgers’s scorched-earth attack on Dr. Anthony Fauci and ESPN, while appearing on ESPN, has prompted a comment from the team and a question to the head coach makes it, necessarily, a distraction.
Still, coach Mike McCarthy’s goal will be to keep any of it from interfering with the task at hand.
“You know, these are grown men,” McCarthy told reporters on Tuesday. “They all have different opinions. There’s no question about that. But at the end of the day, my job is to keep it about football, keep the focus on winning. That’s why we’re here. We have a good locker room. We have a player council that’s in place and we had our second meeting yesterday, and so I think we’re in a good spot.”
It remains to be seen whether Rodgers’s rollicking Monday appearance with Pat McAfee was a one-time thing, or whether Rodgers will revert to his pre-2025 habit of showing up on the show every week — and saying whatever he wants.
It also remains to be seen whether, if/when the Steelers encounter adversity, McCarthy’s methods will become a direct or indirect subject of Rodgers’s current approach (as he said on Monday) of no longer giving a shit.
Monday’s rollicking, grievance-airing appearance by Steelers quarterback Aaron Rodgers on The Pat McAfee Show prompted ESPN, one of the targets of Rodgers’s ire, to say nothing.
The Steelers issued a comment essentially supporting Rodgers’s ability to say whatever he wants, whenever he wants, wherever he wants.
“Discussions around culture and politics can bring differing perspectives, and our players are entitled to their own personal views,” Steelers spokesman Burt Lauten told WTAE-TV, via Steelers Depot. “With respect to that, I am certain there are a variety of opinions on many topics within our locker room.”
It’s an accurate observation, but the real question is what does coach Mike McCarthy think about it? Coaches loathe distractions, and Rodgers gratuitously created one on Monday.
Last year, Rodgers didn’t appear once on McAfee’s show during the season, breaking from a habit of showing up on Tuesdays and, from time to time, spouting off on all sorts of things that prompted scrutiny and criticism. It doesn’t take a genius (which qualifies me for the job) to conclude that former Steelers coach Mike Tomlin found a way to persuade Rodgers to restrict his 2025 media appearances to the league-required midweek and post-game press conferences.
Tomlin lived it with former Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, whose prior habit of making weekly appearances on 93.7 The Fan in Pittsburgh created periodic issues that kept Tomlin from fully focusing on the task of preparing his team to win football games. Eventually, and possibly at Tomlin’s suggestion, Roethlisberger stopped doing it.
If Tomlin were still the coach in Pittsburgh, would Rodgers have gone scorched earth on Dr. Anthony Fauci and ESPN? Probably not.
Things are very different in Latrobe.
On the first day of practice in pads with a head coach other than Mike Tomlin in twenty years, the pads weren’t popping like they used to.
“That was the most tame, uneventful first day in pads I’ve seen in all my years at training camp,” running back Jaylen Warren told reporters after practice, via Nathan Schivins of the Latrobe Bulletin.
Warren, in his fifth Steelers training camp, said that it was “not what we’re used to.”
It’s the latest example of the manner in which new coach Mike McCarthy is balancing player health with preparedness. Eyebrows initially were raised when McCarthy said last week that the Steelers will not tackle to the ground.
The fundamental differences between training-camp intensity will surely be cited as the biggest difference between the two Mikes, in the event a franchise that never had a losing record under Tomlin finds itself under .500 when the dust settles on the 2026 season.
On Monday, Aaron Rodgers had some strong things to say about ESPN. While appearing on ESPN.
Per an ESPN spokesperson, ESPN has no comment regarding Rodgers’s comments.
Rodgers’s rant initially focused on Dr. Anthony Fauci, as Rodgers did a COVID victory lap — one that glossed over the fact that Rodgers was disingenuous at best when he misled reporters in August 2021 on the question of whether he had received a vaccine. Rodgers then pivoted to ESPN, for not covering Fauci’s repeated invocation of the Fifth Amendment at a Senate hearing last Thursday. (Should it have been the lead item on SportsCenter?)
“How much time did the network spend on that?” Rodgers said. “How much time do they spend on my responses every week? On my vaccination status, on Taylor [Swift] and Travis [Kelce’s] wedding? Did they do even a minute? Did they do even a minute on Tony Fauci? No, I bet they didn’t.”
Rodgers also chastised ESPN for not covering the Mike Vrabel-Dianna Russini situation.
“Then there was another scandal this offseason, too, involving a voter for MVP, for coach of the year,” Rodgers said. “How much time did your network spend on that? . . . Like, you have literally an individual that maybe used to work at ESPN that covers our league at the highest level, and there’s a major scandal, and it’s just, like, nobody can fucking talk about it. What are we even doing here? . . . [I]f it’s affecting certain things, if there’s leaks going on, if there’s tampering going on, if that person is also an MVP voter and a coach of the year voter.”
While ESPN did cover it to an extent, it wasn’t as big of a deal as it could have been. A thorough item from Ben Strauss was posted by ESPN.com on a Friday afternoon, with no corresponding car wash of interviews on the various ESPN shows. And ESPN has kept its head low and its mouth shut regarding the question of whether the relationship between Vrabel and Russini impacted her reporting while she worked for ESPN.
Rodgers also accused ESPN of being a “gutless organization” with “no integrity.”
Last year, Rodgers ended his weekly Tuesday visits with Pat McAfee on ESPN. It will be very interesting to see whether Rodgers, in his final NFL season, resumes making the appearances — and whether he continues to air personal grievances and settle old scores.
And whether he continues to take shots at the company that ultimately owns the platform, without any pushback from ESPN.
It really is a “full circle” year for Steelers quarterback Aaron Rodgers.
At a time when Rodgers was seemingly creating a kinder, gentler vibe as he embarks on his final year in the NFL, Rodgers brought the knives out during a Monday appearance on ESPN’s The Pat McAfee Show.
Rodgers started by taking the Fifth Amendment in response to McAfee’s first question. Rodgers then went off on Dr. Anthony Fauci, who last week repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment in testimony before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
“You got a pardon, and you’re in front of — and you pleaded [the Fifth] over 100 times?” Rodgers said. “What are you scared of, Tony? I thought you were the science. I thought you [were], ‘I am science.’ And you get up there and you can’t answer a question?”
The vitriol extended to ESPN, the owner of the channel on which he was appearing.
“How much time did the network spend on that?” Rodgers said. “How much time do they spend on my responses every week? On my vaccination status, on Taylor [Swift] and Travis [Kelce’s] wedding? Did they do even a minute? Did they do even a minute on Tony Fauci? No, I bet they didn’t.”
Rodgers then made reference to ESPN’s conspicuously scant coverage of the Mike Vrabel-Dianna Russini situation.
“Then there was another scandal this offseason, too, involving a voter for MVP, for coach of the year,” Rodgers said. “How much time did your network spend on that?”
Later in the segment (after it migrated from ESPN to YouTube only), Rodgers returned to the Russini story.
“Like, you have literally an individual that maybe used to work at ESPN that covers our league at the highest level, and there’s a major scandal, and it’s just, like, nobody can fucking talk about it,” Rodgers said. “What are we even doing here? . . . [I]f it’s affecting certain things, if there’s leaks going on, if there’s tampering going on, if that person is also an MVP voter and a coach of the year voter.”
Rodgers also referred to ESPN as a “gutless organization” with “no integrity.”
As to Fauci, Rodgers eventually called him “an absolute criminal” while repeatedly labeling him an “absolute coward.” (Rodgers at one point suggested that Fauci’s wife is Ghislaine Maxwell’s sister, before adding “allegedly.”)
Here’s the part where I say some things about what Rodgers said.
First, Rodgers is right about ESPN looking the other way on the Russini-Vrabel story. It’s still not clear why that happened. Given that the relationship (whatever it was) between Russini and Vrabel apparently existed during Russini’s time with ESPN, and to the extent it tainted her work (e.g., the 2021 reporting prior to the Julio Jones trade), ESPN prefers not to peer down that rabbit hole. What did the producers know about the situation, and did they perhaps welcome the benefits it generated for Bristol? Those questions haven’t been asked by ESPN, and surely won’t be.
Second, as to Fauci’s decision to repeatedly invoke the Fifth Amendment, Rodgers doesn’t seem to realize that Fauci’s pardon wouldn’t apply to any effort to paint anything he said last week as perjury. Considering some of the specious (to say the least) prosecutions that have been attempted by the current administration, anything Fauci said could have been called perjury. Even if it wasn’t.
“The only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something — anything — that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words — quote — ‘behind bars,’” Fauci said in his opening remarks to the committee run by Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.).
Third, Rodgers did not mention the one specific thing that caused him to attract the ire of many in 2021. In August of that year, Rodgers publicly lied about being vaccinated. Well, he didn’t lie per se. He played a deliberate word game about being “immunized,” forcing someone to ask a followup question about whether “immunized” means “vaccinated.” (The followup question wasn’t asked.)
Rodgers had every right to not be vaccinated. He wanted to avoid the protocols the league developed (right or wrong) for unvaccinated players, including wearing a mask during press conferences. (Rodgers didn’t wear one during the press conference when he claimed he was “immunized.”) If he hadn’t tested positive in November 2021, the hair-splitting never would have come to light.
It’s kind of amazing that folks are relitigating the fog-of-war niceties of a pandemic that killed more than a million Americans, and which prompted people to say and do all sorts of things (including a suggestion by a fairly influential person to inject bleach) in an effort to get it under control. The issue has been dusted off for one reason: To motivate voters who may be inclined to stay home for the upcoming midterm election, due to growing apathy and/or flat-out antipathy regarding the person who mused about bleach as a potential treatment for the virus.
Bottom line? Rodgers’s decision to take the high road as to his family is hardly an indication that he has fully committed to that path. On Monday, Rodgers took an extended jog on the low road — to the likely dismay of the executives at ESPN who had to hold their breath and count the seconds until it all finally ended.
