Rodgers: This year’s best NFL comeback story

With a sport as popular as football and a position as admired as quarterback, fans sometimes equate heroism with pocket poise, accuracy and arm strength.

But that’s not why I’ve come to admire Aaron Rodgers this season.
And no, I’m not a Green Bay Packers fan. You don’t have to be to notice the lessons Rodgers has taught us this year — belief in your own ability, mental toughness, overcoming obstacles and never losing hope.

Yeah, so far this season, he’s shown all of the intangibles needed to be a great quarterback. But let’s look back to when it all started for Rodgers, way before Week 1.

Remember that time? When we had an entire off-season of Packer fans hating on their front office for letting the greatest quarterback in franchise history leave a team that went 13-3 last year? When they instead put all their chips on a guy who, in his first three seasons in the NFL, had only thrown a combined 59 passes?

Remember all the scrutiny about how Rodgers wasn’t ready to lead a team into anything? How everyone knew that as soon as things started to go bad, Green Bay fans would turn on him?

And remember how mad Packer Nation got when the hallowed Brett Favre signed with the New York Jets? How they said he immediately made the team legitimate, although they were irrelevant just one year ago? How the Packers would crumble, how Rodgers would choke and how Favre would be … well, Favre?

Rodgers had to go into his first season as a starting quarterback in the NFL with all of this noise in the background.

Yes, there have been a lot of guys who have had to take over for Hall of Fame QBs. But never is it under those extreme conditions.

And barely ever are those successors this good.

But what must Rodgers have been thinking going into that season opener?

It may have been only Week 1, but it was perhaps the Packers’ biggest game of the regular season. Not only that, it was on Monday Night Football and, one day prior, Favre had just led his new team to an opening day victory after throwing two touchdown passes.

I don’t know what he was thinking. But I’ll tell you what he wasn’t feeling — pressure. That’s because, in his first three years as a pro, Rodgers had been perfectly trained in the art of blocking out negativity.

A rough start
After being drafted as a first-round pick out of California in 2005 — a year he was expected to be an early Draft pick but slipped down to No. 24 — Rodgers was seen as the future QB for the Packers. Favre was 35 years old at the time and was considering retirement, like he would every year thereafter. But when asked if he would mentor the young Rodgers, Favre brushed it off and said he would simply do his job to be the starting quarterback.

So there was Rodgers, passed up in the Draft, and passed up by a guy who could’ve given him a world of knowledge

After a year of speculation on his retirement, Favre came back to play in 2006, and Rodgers suffered a season-ending left foot injury in a rout by the Patriots early in the year.

But he made a full recovery, and he was ready to be the starting quarterback in 2007 because Favre was going to retire, right? Wrong. Despite speculation about retiring once again, Favre came back to play.

Obviously, it wouldn’t be the first time.

Packers did what they had to do.

That sparked the tumultuous 2008 off-season, when the Packers made a brave stance that didn’t go over very well in Green Bay, or pretty much the entire country.

But they did the right thing.

Yes, Favre was coming off one of the greatest seasons in his already-historic career but, believe it or not, the psyche of their future quarterback was a lot more important.

They couldn’t do that to Rodgers again.

They couldn’t set him up to be the starting quarterback, plan the entire game plan around him and then turn around and do something completely different.

Not again.

So, the Packers decided to finally take a stance and show faith in a guy nobody else did.
Think that didn’t play a big part in Rodgers’ start this year?

Let’s fast-forward to that first game.

Proving all the doubters wrong
During Week 1, against a Minnesota Vikings team that was expected to win the NFC North — especially with God, I mean Favre, out of the picture — Rodgers not only impressed, he fit in. The 24-year-old completed almost 82 percent of his passes, didn’t turn the ball over, threw for a touchdown, ran in another, and topped it all off with the famous Lambeau Leap

And we all know how well he’s played ever since.

The best part about all of it is this: he has said all the right things, has never badmouthed anybody and always kept a level head.

It’s pretty hard to do that when you consider everything he’s gone through.

And that’s why Rodgers should be everybody’s new Favre. §

Alden Gonzalez is a freelance writer and associate reporter for MLB.com, living in Miami. He may be contacted at Alden@towerpublications.com.

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