Rodgers gets called out by ex-Packer Butler after loss
Not that he needs any outside piling on this season but, after a day in which the Chicago Bears did just that, Aaron Rodgers heard about his inability to deliver in the clutch from a former Green Bay Packers player.
“I mean really if you can’t out play Mitch Trubisky, how good are you?” tweeted LeRoy Butler, a safety who played for the team from 1990 to 2001. “Aaron’s only job is to OUT play the other QB! Agree? You will never win scoring 17 pts.”
He was right about that last part. Rodgers completed 25 of 42 passes for 274 yards and zero TDs and threw his first interception in a National Football League-record 402 pass attempts on a tip in the end zone, finishing with a 68.9 per cent passer rating. Trubisky, the Bears’ quarterback, completed 20 of 28 passes for 235 yards, two touchdowns and a 120.4 passer rating.
If there were stats for frustration, Rodgers would lead the league. He has been intercepted only twice on 537 pass attempts, but he has not delivered when it mattered for the Packers, who are 5-8-1. To be sure, he had to fight his way through an injury he suffered in the season opener, but he has come under the kind of criticism to which he is decidedly unaccustomed. It came to a head Sunday, when the team was eliminated from the playoffs for the first time with a healthy Rodgers since 2008.
His stats have not been bad; they’ve just paled in comparison to the league’s youngsters and he has uncharacteristically failed to come through in the clutch, with Green Bay losing a number of close games (some with help from officials) that they would ordinarily have won. When you’re the NFL’s highest-paid player, the questions come quickly and furiously.
Rodgers’ mechanics have come under fire, as has his decisionmaking. He has been criticized for allegedly caring so much about the record for passes without an interception that he was unusually cautious with his throws.
And there have been plenty of passes that were just purely overthrown, as was the case Sunday.
There was even ludicrously premature social media conversation about — gulp — Rodgers’s future at the age of 35.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist Tom Silverstein charted some of the problems. “
... (O)ver and over again, we’ve heard from coaches and Rodgers alike that his mechanics are fine and his injury isn’t bothering him that much anymore. Every week, Rodgers seemed to miss open receivers or make inaccurate throws that were almost always completions in the past. And it was not just a matter of missing them, it was a matter of missing them when the team needed them the most.”
As Silverstein notes, Rodgers was sacked five times with injuries along the offensive line, but there were also moments that were made for him. “It’s just not being on the same page with the guys we’re throwing to,” Rodgers said of his misses, then adding, “You know, some of the ones you probably think are missed throws maybe we are just not on the same page.”
Overall, ESPN’s Rob Demovsky noted that Rodgers completed 4-of-12 passes of 10-plus yards downfield, marking his first game without a touchdown on such throws since Week 4, and 1-of-9 passes of 20-plus yards downfield. He hit Davante Adams on 8-of-12 passes for 119 yards but completed only 6-of-14 for 54 yards to all the other wide receivers. In the third quarter, Rodgers missed Randall Cobb, sending a pass well over his head, and the mistake was repeated with Cobb in the fourth quarter, when the score was tied.
So, instead of leaving Soldier Field with pride and their slim playoff hopes intact, the Packers and Rodgers returned to Wisconsin to prepare for final games against the Jets and Lions and an end to a season that, in retrospect, began ominously last February. That’s when Rodgers questioned the decision to fire quarterbacks coach Alex Van Pelt and signalled the discontent that mushroomed into petty remarks about play-calling and the eventual firing of Mike McCarthy.