HARD KNOCKS? RODGERS, IN TWILIGHT, STILL FACES THE NFL’S MOST PRESSURE

In his 20th season, no one carries more strain than a man who turns 41 and knows he has won only one Super Bowl, which makes it odd to see HBO’s show and hear Caleb Williams talk about “immortality”

     He grew up jamming to Springsteen and Bon Jovi, and soon enough, one or the other might play at his retirement ceremony. Somewhere west of New York, where his 41st birthday is growling, Aaron Rodgers must study Caleb Williams and wince like so many Egyptian pharaohs. The kid is about half his age yet he’ll be showcased on HBO’s “Hard Knocks,” throwing the ball with both feet in the air until tacklers massacre him.

     Oh, and he’ll explain why he’s striving for “immortality” with the Chicago Bears, a team that first needs to finish .500. “Only way to reach that,” he said, “is by winning championships.”

     It’s almost comical, if we weren’t so grieved, to know only one man can be called a hard-knocker from now until next year. That would be Rodgers, who is smothered with more pressure than anyone else in his sport and has one more season to win a second Super Bowl. He maneuvered out of Green Bay as Jordan Love was becoming a star. He played four snaps last season and let his torn Achilles tendon cry for almost a year.

     The Jets say he’s a Comeback Player of the Year candidate. Try, Comeback of Life. This is a quarterback known among the greatest ever, but he has won only one title, in 2011, while Tom Brady was on his way to seven. He isn’t Dan Marino, but he’s also won the same number as Trent Dilfer, Jeff Hostetler, Nick Foles and Brad Johnson. Rodgers has won four Most Valuable Player trophies, yet he has dealt with misery ranging from management to family issues to Jimmy Kimmel.

     He might be fabulous. He might suffer another serious injury. He might sink into the ecosystem of New Jersey wetlands.

     “I think if I don't do what I'm capable of doing, then we're all probably gonna be out of here,” Rodgers said. “As you get older in the league, if you do not perform, they're going to get rid of you or bring in the next guy to take over. It happened in Green Bay, and I'm a few years older than I was back then. I expect to play at a high level. I expect us to be productive and competitive.

     “I don’t know. I’m not sure. This one, for sure.”

     Let’s assume 2024 is the end of the expedition. It’s his 20th year, and if he remains vastly important to the league and its broadcast partners, we also realized last Sept. 11 that he will stop playing soon. “We are must-watch TV and that's pretty obvious. Everyone knows that," Rodgers said. “Whether you love or hate me, people want to see me play. They enjoy watching me play, and we are a team to watch this year.”

     So why wouldn’t he state the obvious? “The goal in New Orleans. It has to be the goal,” he said, naming the next Super Bowl site. “The beauty is, every single year there’s 8 to 12 teams, and we’re one of those 8 to 12.”

     He said it knowing he angered radio hosts and fans who wondered why he vowed to run troublemakers from the team facility — “flush the BS, the bull— that has nothing to with winning needs to get out of the building” — before he missed a mandatory two-day minicamp. He chose a trip with friends to Egypt and paid a fine to the Jets, which sounds like some level of BS itself. “I originally scheduled it based on the previous year’s (practice) schedule, which had us out, I believe, by the 9th or 10th,” Rodgers said. “So once I saw the schedule, I was trying to move some things around. It just didn’t happen. The reaction is what it is.”

     He had a wonderful time. How nice. “The last two days were pretty special. The second-to-last day, we were at the pyramids and the Sphinx in a private viewing. And then we went out in the desert on camels,” he said. “It’s a big animal. It was a lot of fun. Not the nicest animal. I’ve been around llamas before. That’s a big llama. And I was trying to make sure I stayed out of the way of any spit that was coming out, but, yeah, that was fun. We got to watch the sun go down in the desert, watch the moon rise.”

     One teammate raised hell. Garrett Wilson is the best receiver — unless Davante Adams arrives from Las Vegas, which Rodgers would love — and he started beefing in practice. Wasn’t Rodgers supposed to be at camp and helping Wilson in June? Egypt? Several times, they confronted each other.

     “What did he say?” Rodgers said of Wilson.

     “He blamed you,” a reporter said.

     “He blamed me? I blame him!” Rodgers said. “I think there’s often an appearance of a reality in life and on the football field. And what it appears to be might not always be what the reality actually is. As far as whether or not we’re upset with each other, we’re just passionately talking about the details of a situation that might not have to do with either of us. G and I got a great relationship. We spend time together off the field. On the field, there’s a way of doing things that we both agree on. And when it doesn’t look exactly how we want it to, sometimes there’s some side conversations that happen.”

     In public? With media and fans watching?

     “I love those conversations,” Rodgers said. “It’s about the details, it’s about winning, it’s about seeing what he sees. He’s got to get on my page, but I’ve got to get on his page, too, because he’s got a whole book that I need to understand fully of skill set and ability and feel and rhythm and all the different things that he does out there. So, those are good conversations. They might appear to be much more heated than they are, but there’s usually a smile on our face afterward. At least one of us is.”

     Fixation is not the word. To win one more time is beyond obsession.

     Said Wilson: “It's truly enlightening for me every time we have problems like that, despite how it may look, just because I am an emotional, passionate guy. So, when we lose, I might look a certain way, but in reality, all those conversations, those things are helping me be better for Aaron because he can make your life real easy. So, for me, it's my job to be on my details and he's been on me about those details.”

     He isn’t alone. Rodgers ripped his teammates and spent recent sessions in full roar. “I would say ‘demonstrative’ is a good word for him," said receiver Allen Lazard, who played with Rodgers in Green Bay. “You're talking about one of the best, if not the best quarterback of all time, and his standard and level of play is something a lot of guys haven't seen yet. Even this organization — they haven't really been with him on game day, because being with him on the sideline on a Sunday is different. Honestly, he expects the same standard that he holds himself to out of everyone else, and today just didn't resemble that at all.”

     Tight end Tyler Conklin refers to him as “the Oppenheimer of football.” That might go to his head, right? “I think that's the beauty of playing with a great like that. You have someone that's going to, at all times, hold everybody accountable, no matter who you are,” he said. “I think that's really a blessing at the end of the day to have someone that cares that much and has a standard like that. That's going to become our standard as a team. To have a Hall of Famer who has won a Super Bowl -- been there, done that -- I think that's necessary.”

     The standard of Aaron Rodgers is to win the first Monday night, against the 49ers on the road. The Jets then have four winnable games, three at home. A losing record in October might mean a perpetual scowl, the beginning of the end. But before we dismiss him, think about his eventual absence.

     What will football be without him? Our conversations. Our love. Our dissent.

     We’ll miss him, yes. So appreciate what we have.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.