In June, Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers made waves by skipping his team’s mandatory minicamp. The team made the situation worse by calling it unexcused.
Rodgers had yet to address the situation. He did so in a new interview with Pardon My Take.
It was refreshing to hear Rodgers talk on a platform where he had no reason to expect he’d be treated with kid gloves. And the hosts, my Internet son PFT Commenter and Internet nephew Big Cat, did a nice job of using humor to draw things out of him. That’s how the issue of the missed mandatory minicamp came up, through jokes and laughter.
Then, Rodgers gave his real answer on what happened.
“I’m sure I’ll get fined for that,” Rodgers said. “The thing I think people don’t understand is that when I was in the NFC North and played for that team years ago there used to be a real thing called minicamp where it was — you had one of them, usually. Sometimes it was right after the draft. But either way it was five practices in three days. Friday, Saturday, Sunday. So two practices on Friday, two on Saturday, one on Sunday.
“Now, it’s not minicamp. They can arbitrarily put a tag on whatever week of OTAs they want. So this is the ‘minicamp’ week, which makes it somehow more mandatory than the other weeks. But it was an OTA schedule. That’s how words can be a little deceiving from time to time. You can make a story out of the fact that I missed a minicamp when it was really two OTA days. I came to the first 10.”
Big Cat capped that portion of the conversation with this reference to Rodgers’s past forays into semantics (“yeah, I’ve been immunized”): “And you would never like change the meaning of a word or deliberately tell people . . . .”
It came out with a laugh. Rodgers laughed in response, while trying to one-up the joke. It wasn’t entirely clear that he even got the point Big Cat made.
Rodgers’s explanation, which likely will be reiterated during his first training-camp media availability, doesn’t mesh entirely with the story the Jets have been pushing. Most recently, the team’s version, as leaked to the media, was that Rodgers “scheduled the visit for what was believed to be after the offseason programs.”
His explanation also glosses over the fact that he definitely missed mandatory practices. And that the absence from those mandatory practices wasn’t excused by the team.
All he had to do was delay the start of his trip to Egypt by a few days. All the team had to do was excuse the absence.
Rodgers should have been at the mandatory minicamp. Even if the nature of the mandatory minicamp is different than it was when he played for the Packers, it’s still mandatory. There’s no exception for missing a mandatory minicamp based on showing up for all non-mandatory practices.
Rodgers is smart enough to know that. He’s also smart enough to come up with a justification for his behavior that looks good on the surface. Which makes him perfectly suited for the political career he apparently plans to launch, at some point.
