Packers Clips
Matt LaFleur succeeded Mike McCarthy as Packers head coach in 2019.
The two have coached against one another before and on Thursday will do it again as McCarthy makes his preseason debut as head coach of the Steelers.
McCarthy, of course, won Super Bowl XLV with Green Bay to cap the 2010 season.
LaFleur said he’s gotten to know McCarthy through connecting at league meetings and the times McCarthy has come back to visit Green Bay.
“I’ll say this — I’ve got so much respect for him,” LaFleur said in his Monday press conference. “First of all, how he’s always treated me. Secondly, just by what he’s accomplished here. It’s pretty cool that, when he got the Pittsburgh job, I’m like, Green Bay Packers, Dallas Cowboys, Pittsburgh Steelers — I mean, that’s pretty special.
“So, Mike’s a guy I’ve got a ton of respect for.”
The Packers and Steelers will kick off in Pittsburgh at 7 p.m. ET on Thursday night.
We’ve known for some time that Packers defensive end Micah Parsons won’t return to action for the first four games of Green Bay’s season, but just how long he’ll be out remains up in the air.
Parsons recently said that it was less important when he’s back than what kind of player he is when he’s back on the field, but it remains a popular topic of conversation around the star pass rusher. During an appearance on NFL Network Monday, Parsons was asked if he thinks he can make it back for a Week 6 home game against the Cowboys.
“That’s the most optimistic that I could be back,” Parsons said. “I could be later, there could be setbacks. Trying to integrate back into football is completely different than running on cones and ladders.”
The prospect of playing the team that dealt him to the Packers is surely an appealing one for Parsons, but the bigger picture will take precedence for the key member of the Packers defense. More clarity on the chance of Parsons, who said he’s “pretty happy” with where he is in the rehab process, returning for that game will come in the next few weeks.
The Packers announced three roster on Sunday.
They have signed wide receiver Kisean Johnson as a free agent. They waived safety Johnathan Baldwin and cornerback Marlon Jones in corresponding moves.
Johnson went undrafted out of Western Kentucky last year and signed with the Browns. He spent time on the Packers’ practice squad during the regular season, but did not appear in any games.
Johnson had 75 catches for 925 yards and seven touchdowns in his final college season.
Baldwin played in one game for Green Bay last season and Jones signed with the team after going undrafted this year. Both players will revert to injured reserve if they are unclaimed.
When Giants running back Cam Skattebo did a backflip while recovering from an injury, coach John Harbaugh joked that he should have stuck the landing. When a couple of oft-injured Packers players did backflips, coach Matt LaFleur took a harder line.
Packers running back MarShawn Lloyd and wide receiver Christian Watson, both of whom have been injury-prone, both did backflip celebrations, and LaFleur told them to knock it off.
Lloyd said after a training camp practice that LaFleur told him to stop.
“I’ve always been able to do it,” Lloyd told reporters. “Coach LaFleur doesn’t want me to do it no more. . . . He said it was cool, but he said, ‘Let’s not do that.’”
Lloyd said LaFleur told Watson to stop the backflips, too.
“He told him the same thing: Stop doing them,” Lloyd said.
Lloyd said he was trying to bring some energy to the running back group, which hadn’t been celebrating the way the receivers were.
“The running backs weren’t doing any celebrations when we were scoring,” Lloyd said. “The whole offense wasn’t liking that. The receivers came into the running back room, and said you guys need to start celebrating more. So that was the first thing that came to my mind. I can’t dance. I don’t know how to do the dance they’re doing. But I know how to do a backflip.”
In two years since the Packers selected him in the third round of the 2024 NFL draft, Lloyd has been plagued with injuries and played in only one game. Lloyd understands that LaFleur wants him to stay healthy, and accepts that the no backflips rule is a part of that.
“I’ve been doing them for a long time, but it’s fine,” Lloyd said. “If he said it’s over, it’s over.”
One of Green Bay’s top offensive players is not practicing on Thursday, but he should be back on the field soon.
According to multiple reporters on the scene, Packers running back Josh Jacobs is not participating due to a groin injury.
But this is not expected to be a long-term absence.
Jacobs, 28, dealt with multiple injury concerns in 2025. He finished the year with 929 yards rushing with 13 touchdowns, along with 36 receptions for 282 yards with a TD.
A first-round pick in the 2019 draft, Jacobs has taken 1,840 carries and tallied 2,109 total touches with 76 total touchdowns so far in his career.
Old-school coaches will often attribute missed practice time in training camp to serious in-season injuries, like torn ACLs.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Packers linebacker Micah Parsons gave some credence to that notion.
Asked why he thinks his ACL injury happened on what seemed to be a fairly routine play in Week 15 against the Broncos, Parsons said this: “You know, it’s hard to really think — I could just think of it was just accumulative things within my body, pushing through, the no camp, dealing with injuries throughout the season, and I just think my body just was overloaded and — which caused my knee to give out. But, you know, I don’t really think why the situation happened. I think, based off of, you know, how I feel at this point, I feel like a much better player in the sense of how I feel. I feel more stable. I feel stronger.”
Parsons skipped all of training camp last year while waiting for a contract from the Cowboys that never came. Eventually, he was traded to the Packers less than two weeks before the start of the regular season.
While the pro-laundry crowd will point to Parsons’s explanation as a reason for players to not hold in while negotiating a new deal, the better view is that both sides should treat the start of training camp as a firm deadline for getting something done, negotiating in good faith toward the agreed-to stroke of midnight, and get the deal done before camp opens.
Most of these deals are going to get done anyway. Why not get them done in a way that ensures the player will be available to properly prepare himself for the season?
The entire goal for the player is to obtain the security that comes from shifting the injury risk to the team. The player holds in to avoid that risk. If the team is inevitably going to be assuming the risk, why not do it at a time that allows the player to best prepare himself for an injury-free season?
The Packers signed tight ends McCallan Castles and Drew Biber on Tuesday, the team announced.
In corresponding moves, the Packers waived tight end RJ Maryland and waived tight end Luke Lachey with an injury designation.
Castles, a first-year player out of the University of Tennessee, spent the second half of last season on the Packers’ practice squad. He signed a futures contract and was in Green Bay this offseason until the Packers waived him April 17.
He entered the league with the Eagles as an undrafted free agent in 2024. Castles spent time on the Chargers’ practice squad in 2024 before they waived him early in the 2025 training camp. He spent the rest of 2025 training camp with the Rams before they cut him.
Biber is a rookie who played four seasons for Purdue (2021-24) and one season at the University of Minnesota (2025). Overall, he saw action in 50 games, recording 33 receptions for 271 yards and a touchdown.
Last season, Biber set career highs in games played (13), receptions (18) and receiving yards (136).
The Steelers signed wide receiver Jakobie Kenney-James, the team announced Tuesday.
In a corresponding move, the Steelers waived wide receiver Cole Burgess with an injury designation. Burgess went down with a lower-body injury earlier this week.
Keeney-James was among the players who worked out for the team last week.
He originally signed with the Lions as a college free agent following the 2025 draft.
Kenney-James spent time with the Packers as a rookie, initially signing to the practice squad on Sept. 23 before being elevated to the active roster for the Week 18 game against Minnesota. He started one game and recorded two receptions for 15 yards. He also returned two kicks for 47 yards.
Kenney-James played his final season of college football at the University of Massachusetts, where he appeared in nine games. He had 40 receptions for 603 yards and five touchdowns. He transferred to UMass from Eastern Washington and appeared in 49 collegiate games, with 111 receptions for 1,664 yards and 10 touchdowns.
It remains unclear when Packers defensive end Micah Parsons will be back on the field, but he doesn’t think anyone should be focused on the calendar when thinking about his return from last year’s torn ACL.
Parsons is not expected to be ready to go at the start of the regular season and he called it “very realistic” that he’ll be back for a Week 6 home game against the Cowboys while speaking to reporters on Tuesday. He also said that the actual date of his return is of less importance than the player he is when he does make his next appearance in the Green Bay lineup.
Parsons made it clear that he’s expecting to be just as disruptive to offenses as he was before the injury.
“When you come out of these situations, you’re either going to be better or worse,” Parsons said, via Matt Schneidman of TheAthletic.com. “For me, I’ve done everything I possibly can to be better. People are worried about if I come back. People should worry about how I’m gonna be when I come back. That’s my mentality and how I feel, how I’m gonna approach when I’m back. People worried about the knee, they should be worried about how I’m gonna play when I get back. The anger, the frustration, the things that I’m about to let out because of how long it’s been since I’ve played. So I think that’s what people should really worry about. How great is Micah gonna be when he gets back? Not about when I get back because that’s the short term.”
The Packers know Parsons’s long-term value to the team is greater than what a few early season games are worth, so everyone should be on board with Parsons getting as much time as needed to feel like he can be the defensive force that the Packers need him to be this season.
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.
