Aaron Rodgers should come back to the Packers in 2023

Green Bay Packers fandom is divided about what would be best for the team in regards to current starting quarterback Aaron Rodgers.

Some people want Rodgers to hang up the jersey or be traded to another team for draft compensation, but others want 12 to return for another year.

I prefer the latter.

Aaron Rodgers has played the quarterback position at the highest level for the past decade and I think he should be able to end his career in Green Bay and not with another franchise.

We are in an era where the greats have not been able to retire while only playing for one team. Tom Brady, Phillip Rivers, and Matt Ryan are all recent examples of this. With how often Rodgers talks about legacy, finishing his career in Green Bay is something that he would like to accomplish.

The money side of things is pretty ugly no matter how this situation plays out. The contract doesn’t look good for the Packers and they are going to have to pay the price for it.

And with the Packers potentially picking up Jordan Love’s fifth-year option, I think its increasingly likely that Rodgers will come back for his 19th and final season next year.

But even with wanting to see what Love is and wanting to move into the post-Rodgers era of Packers football, I think Rodgers deciding against retirement makes sense on the playing side of things.

He hasn’t been playing like a league MVP, and that isn’t ideal. But he’s also not playing how Peyton Manning did in 2015 or Matt Ryan is playing this year. Rodgers is not washed.

Rodgers has 22 touchdowns and nine picks this year, which isn’t great, but isn’t exactly the nine touchdowns and 17 interceptions that Manning had, or the 13 touchdowns and 13 interceptions that Ryan has this year.

Matter of fact, Geno Smith has 22 touchdowns and six interceptions and he was a kind-of-MVP candidate for a while.

"“A lot of times, down years for me are career years for most quarterbacks,” Aaron Rodgers said in 2020 on the Pat McAfee Show."

Even though he has had some embarrassing misses this year, like his misses against the Titans which weren’t even close, I would like to remind people that Rodgers in 2018 against Seattle missed a pass in the flat to Marquez Valdes-Scantling by a lot, so its not like we’ve never seen him miss open players.

He has been playing with an avulsion fracture in his throwing thumb since Week 6 and I think that has had at least a little bit to do with some of his misses this year.

But more important than the fracture, it has just simply taken time for him to adjust to not having the best wide out in football and having two, but sometimes only one, rookie receivers be thrust into having to be the team’s number one pass catcher.

Romeo Doubs, who has earned Rodgers’ trust, will likely return after the bye week. He has not played a full game in a month and he is still fourth in targets on the team. In his absence we have seen the emergence of Christian Watson, who has eight touchdowns in the four games Doubs has missed.

With the team’s shortcomings this year, which Rodgers has to take a good amount of blame for, they can bolster the receiver room by taking a playmaker like TCU’s Quentin Johnston or Ohio State’s Jaxon Smith-Njigba with their likely high draft pick.

Rodgers talked earlier this season, and reiterated on Sunday, about how the development of the young wide outs could extend his playing career.

Worst-case scenario in my plan, Rodgers doesn’t play well in 2023 and retires but gets a curtain call and a chance to wipe the bad taste of 2022 out of his mouth and put on a show at Lambeau eight more times. Even in this plan, we get to see Jordan Love run Matt LaFleur’s offense with a receiver room of Watson, Doubs, and a potential first round selection.