After bonding with teammates earlier this month, Aaron Rodgers has bonded with his family.
The Steelers quarterback was famously estranged from his parents, Ed and Darla, and his brothers, Luke and Jordan, for at least a decade. But on Monday night, Rodgers shared three photos — one with his mom, one with his dad and one with Luke — on Instagram.
He wrote: “Another bonding week #fam.”
Jordan was notably absent from the photos.
In March, Aaron Rodgers talked about his rift with his family on The Pat McAfee Show.
“If you look at the saga with my family, for years it was one-sided,” Rodgers said. “They were making shots in the media saying bullshit. I never said anything until it got to the point where I’m like, ‘All right, enough is enough.’”
His estrangement from his family became public during Jordan Rodgers’ appearance on The Bachelorette in 2016, and Aaron Rodgers discussed it during the 2024 Netflix docuseries, Aaron Rodgers: Enigma.
He pointed to his parents’ strict religious beliefs as a reason for the falling-out.
“I grew up in a very white, dogmatic church and that just didn’t really serve me,” Aaron said. “It was very rigid in structure. I’m not a rigid person. Shame, guilt, judgment. It was like, ‘We have the truth. Our way or the highway. Our way is heaven; your way is hell.’ Even talking to my parents, it was very black and white. Like, somebody has to be wrong, [and] somebody has to be right. I just slowly uncoupled from that in high school.”
The hatchet, though, has apparently been buried, and the past forgotten.
Packers Clips
Packers defensive tackle Devonte Wyatt is no longer in the final year of his contract.
According to multiple reports, Wyatt has agreed to a three-year contract extension with the team. The Packers had exercised Wyatt’s fifth-year option for the 2026 season at a $12.938 million salary.
Wyatt is set to make $57 million under the terms of the extension and the deal includes a $20 million signing bonus.
Wyatt was a 2022 first-round pick and he has appeared in 57 regular season games for the Packers. He started all 10 games he played last season, but saw his season come to an early end with a broken fibula.
Prior to the injury, Wyatt had 27 tackles and four sacks. He has 101 tackles, 16 sacks, a forced fumble and three fumble recoveries over his entire time in Green Bay.
The Packers have made it to the playoffs in each of the last three seasons, but their stays in the postseason have not been long ones.
After winning in Dallas to kick off the 2023 playoffs, the team has lost their last three postseason outings. The most recent defeat saw them blow an 11-point lead against the Bears in the fourth quarter and led to questions about whether the team would move forward with head coach Matt LaFleur.
LaFleur remains on the sideline and the team avoided major changes to the roster this offseason, but linebacker Isaiah McDuffie doesn’t believe the team is missing anything they need to get over the hump in 2026
“I think we’ve got everything we need,” McDuffie said on NFL Network. “At the end of the day, it’s just finishing. Getting late in the season, just finishing those games when we are up on guys, just putting the nail in the coffin.”
While the Packers opted against a major shakeup, they did bring in a new defensive coordinator when Jeff Hafley left to become Miami’s head coach. McDuffie said that Jonathan Gannon “definitely brings that juice” and that “it’s going to be fun to watch us” execute the things that Gannon has installed on that side of the ball.
That prediction will be likelier to come true if Micah Parsons can return to full speed, but McDuffie and the rest of the Packers will have to keep things afloat until that happens.
The Cowboys traded Micah Parsons to the Packers before the start of the 2025 season. As part of their effort to replace the All-Pro edge rusher, the Cowboys acquired Rashan Gary for a fourth-round pick during the offseason.
Gary, a former first-round pick of Green Bay who signed a four-year $96 million extension in 2023, has 46.5 sacks in seven seasons.
His entire focus heading into his first season in Dallas is to become what Parsons already is.
“I’m trying to be great,” Gary told Joseph Hoyt of The Dallas Morning News. “That’s my thing. I’m not just here to say I played in the NFL. I want to be a dominant factor. When I hang up my cleats, I want people to say, ‘Man, Rashan Gary was blah, blah, blah,’ whatever the case may be. It’s my legacy. It’s what I’m going to leave my kids. It’s bigger than me now.”
Gary has gone from mentee to mentor, helping the Cowboys’ young pass rushers, Donovan Ezeiruaku and Malachi Lawrence, in what will be an edge rusher-by-committee. Cowboys coach Brian Schottenheimer recently called Gary a “grown-ass man” when asked about Gary’s professionalism.
While the Cowboys have missed the postseason the past two years, Gary has played nine postseason games in his seven seasons. The 2022 season is the only season Gary has watched all of the playoffs from home.
“You see what football brings to you, then you understand that you can’t play this game lightly,” Gary said of his message to teammates. “You can never cheat the game, and I’m a big believer in that and the football gods. So just understanding the things that football has brought to me and how it’s changed my life. I owe it all, and that’s all I ask of you.”
The NFL is currently unveiling the result of its annual Top 100 players survey, and Packers linebacker Micah Parsons is not happy with where his fellow players ranked his quarterback.
Parsons wrote on social media that Packers quarterback Jordan Love, who was ranked No. 72 in the player poll, should have been a lot higher.
“71 players in the NFL aren’t better than Jordan love!” Parsons wrote.
Love has been ranked in the Top 100 after each of his three seasons as the Packers’ starting quarterback, but his ranking has steadily declined. In 2024 he was No. 34, in 2025 he was No. 68, and now in 2026 he’s No. 72.
Parsons’ own ranking has not yet been revealed. Last year he ranked No. 36.
The Packers have reached a new deal with one of their key defensive and special teams players.
Green Bay announced on Monday that the club has signed linebacker Isaiah McDuffie to a contract extension.
Via Jeremy Fowler of ESPN, it’s a one-year extension through 2027. McDuffie is now set to earn $8.8 million over the next two seasons, plus $1 million available in play-time incentives.
McDuffie was previously entering the last season of a two-year contract he signed with the club in the 2025 offseason. A sixth-round pick in the 2021 draft, McDuffie has appeared in 80 games with 38 starts.
In 2025, he appeared in all 17 regular-season games with 12 starts. He finished the season with 92 total tackles, a sack, and an interception. He was on the field for 45 percent of the team’s defensive snaps and 72 percent of special teams snaps last year.
Decades before football became Nikefied, with teams having nearly as many different uniforms as they have games, it was rare — and thus special — when a team showed up for a game with a different look. Notre Dame provided the epitome of that move, rarely dusting off green jerseys at the perfect moments.
It started on October 29, 1977. Facing No. 5 USC in South Bend, the Irish rolled a Trojan horse onto the field. And then roared out of the tunnel wearing green jerseys for the first time ever. Quarterback Joe Montana and company picked apart the Men of Troy, 49-19.
Now, most college teams wear something other than their base uniform so often that it’s never special. Still, Notre Dame will have a special outfit for the team’s Week 1 game against Wisconsin at Lambeau Field. It’ll be the first time Notre Dame ever has played there.
Via J.J. Post of ESPN, the uniform for the game pays homage to the Green Bay Packers. The shade of blue matches the 1920s Acme Packers, along with the stripes on the sleeves.
The video introducing the uniforms traces the connections between the Packers and the Irish. Curly Lambeau played for Knute Rockne. Paul Hornung starred for both Notre Dame and Green Bay.
“We are the outliers,” coach Marcus Freeman says in the video. “The small-town legends. The independent spirits who believe tradition isn’t something you just remember. It’s something you wear.”
The jersey also has eleven shamrocks on the collar, reflecting Notre Dame’s 11 consensus national championships: 1924, 1929, 1930, 1943, 1946, 1947, 1949, 1966, 1973, 1977, 1988.
The Irish are currently stuck in the longest title drought. The last one came against West Virginia and Major Harris, 38 years ago. (That one still hurts for those of us who don’t need the Country Roads to take us home, because we’re already there.)
On September 6 — in one of only two college football games to be played on the Sunday of Labor Day Weekend — the Irish will invade Wisconsin and make Green Bay their castle for a day, as they try to take out the team that otherwise calls Wisconsin home.
It’s not as if Notre Dame needs the extra boost they got from morphing into the Green Machine against USC. The Irish are 20.5-point favorites against the Badgers, and Notre Dame is among the short-list favorites to add a twelfth shamrock to that collar.
The NFL is making a significant change to the offseason calendar for the 2027 season.
Tom Pelissero of NFL Media reports that the free agent negotiating window will open on March 9 next year. That is the same date that the two-day window opened this year, but the change comes in how close it will be to the end of the Scouting Combine.
NFL teams will wrap up their examinations and interrogations of incoming prospects on March 8 in 2027, which moves the league away from having a week or so between the two events as they have in past years.
Under that setup, the Combine has always been rife with table-setting for free agency as agents and team executives are all in the same place with their minds on the same things. With that gap eliminated, there will likely be even more of that work being done in Indianapolis so that teams are ready to make moves right from the starting gun.
Aaron Rodgers and Mike McCarthy are in their first year together in Pittsburgh, but after 13 years together in Green Bay, they know each other as well as any quarterback and head coach in the NFL.
Rodgers says he knows exactly what he needs to do in the McCarthy system, and it’s all about him having his timing down with his teammates.
“It’s just the next generations of the West Coast offense,” Rodgers said, via TribLive.com. “It went kind of Bill Walsh to kind of what Mike was doing with Paul Hackett, and then it’s kind of grown from there. From a real fundamental level, it’s all about the quarterback’s timing.”
Rodgers said McCarthy has changed some of the terminology in his offense since the two were last together on the 2018 Packers, but the system is fundamentally the same.
“I spent 13 years in [McCarthy’s offense],” Rodgers said. “He’s changed some stuff when he was in Dallas. . . . It’s stuff that we used to run, but he’s just called it something different now.”
In three months, McCarthy will hope to see Rodgers running that offense the same way he did in Green Bay.
As Netflix expands its NFL footprint to include a full five toes of NFL games in 2026, it’s hoping to enhance its desire to “eventize” football with some normalcy.
Elle Duncan of Netflix tells the Sports Media Watch podcast that the studio show for the games will have the same people involved.
“We’re not doing an 18-game slate,” Duncan said, via Derek Futterman of Sports Media Watch. “We want every single one of our events to, yes, have a through-line and some consistency, and you’ll get that with the desk and the talent, but, ‘How are we making each one of those things feel special and different and honor where we’re doing it at?’”
Netflix will stream the Week 1 game from Australia between the 49ers and Rams, the Thanksgiving Eve game between the Packers and Rams in L.A., two Christmas games (Packers-Bears and Bills-Broncos), and a Saturday afternoon game to launch Week 18.
Officially, Netflix doesn’t aspire to have a full, season-long NFL broadcast package. However, with its current arrangement in place through 2029, Netflix could eventually decide to make a bid on one of the various weekly windows.
