The NFL Had to Factor Aaron Rodgers' Inability to Make Up His Mind Into Their Schedule-Making Process

John Angelillo. Shutterstock Images.

We're now [checks calendar] smack in the middle of May. A time when the NFL's expanded rosters are largely set. And apart from a little bit of motion around the rough edges along the bottoms of everyone's depth charts, all the major decisions have been made. 

With one exception.

It's starting to get uncanny with how much Aaron Rodgers' career has been echoing Brett Favre's. Both play for the Packers. Win one Super Bowl. Start expressing doubts about their futures in Green Bay. Ownership becomes frustrated and uses a first round pick on their replacement. Eventually they feel insecure about having the new guy waiting in the wings and sign with the Jets. Then spend all their offseasons equivocating on their future some more. Rodgers is now one contract with Minnesota and one dick pic to a female team staffer away from filling his entire Brett Favre Bingo card. 

The last we heard from ARod he was tossing this word salad on the Pat McAfee Show:

“I’m open to anything and attached to nothing. Retirement could still be a possibility, but right now my focus is and has been and will continue to be on my personal life. … There’s still conversations that are being had. 

“I’m in a different phase of my life. I’m 41 years old, I’m in a serious relationship. I have off-the-field stuff that requires my attention. I have personal commitments I’ve made not knowing what my future was going to look like after last year that are important to me. And I have a couple of people in my inner, inner circle who are really battling some difficult stuff. So, I have a lot of things that are taking my attention — and have, beginning really in January — away from football.”

I mean, good luck being with the Steelers and trying to sift through this gobbledygook looking for the first clue as to what his intentions are. If management in Pittsburgh hasn't completely crossed him off their list and moved on by now, they deserve to reap the consequences of letting one of the most average QBs in the league last year hold them hostage. 

But as it turns out, Rodgers' Hamlet act has affected more than just one franchise with a terrible QB room. The league itself had to work his indecision into the calculus of the very complex task of putting a schedule together:

Source - Steelers owner Art Rooney II lamented the team’s late-season night games after the schedule was released on Wednesday night, but the team will be playing at 1 p.m. ET on Sunday in four of their first five games of the year. 

That’s related to the ongoing uncertainty about whether quarterback Aaron Rodgers will be in a Steelers uniform. The Jets were scheduled for Monday night openers the last two seasons and had a slew of other standalone and short-week games as the league tried to spotlight the four-time MVP. …

Rodgers is expected to sign with the Steelers, but NFL vice president of broadcast planning and scheduling Mike North told Jonathan Jones of CBS Sports that the league did not take that hypothetical into consideration when they decided to schedule a Steelers visit to the Jets in the season opener. If they had, North suggested that the Steelers would be featured more prominently than they will be in the 1 p.m. ET window. 

“You’ll see Pittsburgh at the Jets are on CBS at 1 o’clock in the afternoon in Week 1 along with seven other NFL games all at the same time,” North said. “I think if the league knew, we probably would’ve scheduled that game for a national television window. … If we knew something, I think you would’ve seen it reflected in the schedule. That being said, still a good game.”

I'm not suggesting Aaron Rodgers owes it to anyone but Aaron Rodgers to make a decision that's in the best interest of anyone but Aaron Rodgers. This is America, where the Founding Fathers wrote the freedom to look out for No. 1 into the Bill of Rights. Maybe not explicitly, but it's implied. 

But any team still holding out hope he'll be under center for them come September has to take this into account. At best, he's a low grade narcissist. At worst, he's a raging egomaniac for whom five months isn't enough time to decide what his future holds. Either way, it's obvious he loves this attention. All these people - owners, GMs, coaches, schedule makers, broadcast partners, sponsors, and oh yeah, fans - breathlessly waiting to see if there'll be black or white smoke coming out of his emotional chimney is probably making him erect right now. And the longer he draws out the process, the more he's the center of attention. 

I assume that if he does sign with Pittburgh or anyone else, that the NFL can't move these 1pm games into prime time. Not so early in the season, anyway. But for Rodgers, they'll probably make an exception. After all, as we learned in Deflategate, Article 46 gives Kommissar Goodell absolute authority to do whatever he wants, absolutely. A federal court held as much:

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If they do, or even if they move a game back into the 4pm window and screw some other fanbase out of the late afternoon game, the rest of us will have no choice but to hope for a repeat of this:

Michael Owens. Getty Images.

It would serve them right. My guess is that Rodgers will keep dragging this out to August, at least. Hopefully by then he'll find out everyone else stopped caring what he does.