Analyzing Aaron Rodgers’ complicated legacy ahead of Steelers tenure | Dan Patrick Show | NBC Sports

Mike Florio joins Dan Patrick to discuss the NFL collusion ruling, Aaron Rodgers’ legacy and Mike Tomlin’s future with the Pittsburgh Steelers. #NBCSports #DanPatrickShow #NFL
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Analyzing Aaron Rodgers’ complicated legacy ahead of Steelers tenure | Dan Patrick Show | NBC Sports
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Uh, there’s always a crowd around Mike Florio because he’s really popular. He is a football insider. I hope to graduate one day to be a football insider. Do you guys have like a newsletter like you stay in touch with Glazer and Sheffy and are there dues, you know, like tight end university, the NFL insider, you and Rapaort? Well, I think the reality is if there was a club of insiders, I’d be the outsider. That is true. Um, can the NFL draft get any bigger? No. No. But it will. They just stumble into things. It’s amazing. The NFL’s business model just kind of float along and when something happens that looks like adversity, it turns into a positive. The reason the draft became this traveling road show with hundreds of thousands of people is because they had a conflict in 2015 at Radio City Music Hall because there was an Easter spectacular that conflicted with the preferred date of the draft. So the NFL said, “Well, we got to go somewhere else. Let’s go to Chicago.” Hey, that was pretty good. Let’s go back to Chicago. Hey, let’s go somewhere else. Let’s go to Philly. And that was the moment that shot. I still remember it. The shot of the thousands of people by the library there. It’s like, oh man, the draft is different now and it’s going to keep growing and growing, but relative to everything else, it can’t get much bigger. It can’t. And it’s amazing because they could do it by a group text if they wanted to. Well, it’s like Coachella. It’s a music festival for the NFL and it’s Pittsburgh next year. Um, I don’t know. Did they decide on the following year? DC. DC. Okay. National Mall. But they are, Dan. There was some reporting, I think, from Sports Business Journal. They’re trying to find more stuff they can drop, Wednesday before the draft, Sunday, extend it, have more reasons to have more people show up beyond Thursday, Friday, Saturday. We got a couple of teams with some stadium deals, it feels like, um, you know, Cleveland, I guess, going to be moving out of downtown. Washington wants to move back into downtown. The Bears, are they moving out of like what’s going on with these uh these teams and stadiums? Well, you’ve got the Browns that look to be moving to Suburban Brook Park. They’re putting the pieces in place to make that happen. The Bengals have a deal to stay put at Payor Stadium in Cincinnati reportedly until the middle of the nest next decade with the Bears and and also with Washington. You know, this was presented when the deal was done with great fanfare. There’s the commissioner. There’s owner Josh Harris. There’s the mayor of DC. We have a deal. We have a deal. Well, wait a minute. We don’t have a deal because the DC council has to approve it. And I think it’s getting harder and harder, Dan, to get the kind of public money that you need to build these stadiums. Because I’d say the appetite of the average taxpayer is why why are you using public money when these franchises are worth more and more all the time? 10 billion minimum after the Lakers recent sale that had a valuation of the franchise at 10 billion. So pay it for it yourself. And I was making that point earlier this week because Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania governor, said some things that initially were misinterpreted by the AP, but ultimately the message is we’re not going to be giving out a ton of public money here. At some point, pay for it yourself. You know, Dan, when you go to the grocery store, the grocery store is there for the benefit of the public, right? We all go in and buy our groceries. I never hear stories about the government giving the grocery store chains millions and billions of dollars to build their stores. And that’s what a football stadium is. is a big store that they lure thousands of people to. Why is it something that the public has to pay for? The people putting on the show are the ones that should be expected to pay for. He’s Mike Florio, Pro Football Talk Live co-host. That show precedes ours with Chris Sims and his books, Father of Mine, Son of Mine, available in ebook form on Amazon for only 99. the collusion story that you and Pablo Tore uh colluded on to talk about collusion. How did Okay, let’s do it for the fan. Does Does the fan should the fan care about this? Well, the fan doesn’t care about it because I think one of the problems is the fan just assumes that that’s how business is done. They assume the NFL is one giant company and the teams are 32 branches and they coordinate and collude all the time. The problem is that they are 32 separate businesses. They shouldn’t be colluding, conspiring, coordinating on anything that doesn’t fall within one of their antitrust exemptions. They’ve got a broadcast antitrust exemption and they’ve got an antitrust exemption to deal with their union generally, not with the players individually. And I think the question is, and I just got a text a little bit ago that is going to spark another story at PFT. How widespread is this collusive activity that we finally have found evidence of? Even though the NFL won the grievance, they were caught with their hand in the collusion cookie jar. How else are they doing it? For example, are they doing it with coaches? I believe they are. I’ve believed for years that they collude when it comes to coaches to hold down what coaches make. There’s no salary cap, right? But there’s also no salary floor. They collude, I believe, on all sorts of things because they operate as one company even though they’re supposed to be competing. And the point I made, and I don’t know if you’ve talked about the text messages between Dean Spanos and Michael Bidwell. Spanos congratulates Bidwell on getting Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray signed to a contract that wasn’t fully guaranteed. And Spanos says, “This helps with our quarterback.” You know the point I’ve been making, Dan, does the CEO of Pepsi call up the CEO of Coke and say, “Congratulations on getting your director of research signed to this contract because now we can use the same terms.” No, they’re in competition. But I think because the average fan just assumes there’s a certain amount of armlocking, they they don’t care, but they should care. They should care because it’s an example of how business gets done in ways that it shouldn’t get done. Any fallout from this? like what’s next? Well, it all depends upon, I believe, what the players do now. Will the players who are in charge of the union push back against union management which hid this thing for 5 and a half months? That’s the biggest part of this, Dan. The players union through that ruling on January 15, January 14, excuse me, of 2025, they acquired a hammer that they could use against the NFL in a lot of different ways. And what did they do? They stuck it in a drawer and locked it for 5 and a half months until Pablo finally got it. And I credit him for getting it because I tried every way I possibly could. And I’m going to take some credit cuz I kept banging and banging and banging to get people to understand this thing’s out there and it’s important and somebody needs to get it, especially because they were hiding it. I understand why the league hit it because the league looks bad. I don’t understand why the union hit it. And it all comes down to whether or not the players who are in leadership positions at the union insist on more and whether they take this thing now and finally do use it as a hammer and find other ways to push and pressure the NFL to to, you know, get a better overall deal for the players. I know that we’ve talked a lot, you’ve talked a lot, everybody’s talked a lot about Aaron Rogers with the Steelers. And I feel like we don’t separate Rogers, the football player, from Rogers, the person, and his opinions, and he can be polarizing. I just want to know the football part of this with Aaron Rogers. I know with his age, but with that team, I know he says that this is it, a one-year deal, but what are your expectations for this team? Well, first of all, when he said the other day he’s pretty sure this is it. I mean, is that really anything that we didn’t already believe? Yeah, we’re all pretty sure this is it. He’s he’s in his early 40s. He he’s he’s had injuries. He’s been banged up. His mobility isn’t what it used to be. But what I think, Dan, when you look at Rogers, the quarterback, the thrower, the arm is still there. And if he can resist his temptation to try to run like he used to, cuz I think that’s how he’s going to get himself hurt. He’s got to adopt the Tom Brady late career mindset of the moment I feel the walls closing in, I’m getting rid of the ball. Now, for Rogers, who regards his touchdown to interception ratio as the thing that makes him the best of all time, he might not be as inclined as Brady was to just throw the ball up into the air. And we saw Brady do it over and over again. He did it multiple times in the NFC Championship game that the Buccaneers eventually won over Rogers and the Packers. When in doubt, get rid of it. If it gets picked off, so what? At least I didn’t get blown up. That’s the key. Rogers has to prioritize not getting hit. He’s got to get rid of the ball. He’s got to get the ball down the field and he can’t try to run with it. He’s got to play like he did. Remember the year that he had the calf injury and he stayed in the middle of the pocket. He’s got to play like he’s got that calf injury because if he starts getting hit, he will have a calf injury and a knee injury and a hip injury and rib injuries and a shoulder injury because these guys literally are half his age that are chasing him around. Now, who came up with the, you know, he’s the best thrower of the football of all time. I get but because if somebody said somebody is he’s the most athletic basketball player I’ve ever seen or he throws the ball harder than any pitcher ever. My first my my follow-up question or first question would be well was he successful? So you have the best greatest thrower of the football. I don’t know what that means. Well, what it means is, and I read the Ian Oconor biography last year, you know, when you walk out onto a field and you’re standing there and you hear a sound and you don’t know what the hell the sound is, and you realize it’s the sound that the ball makes when Aaron Rogers throws it that few others can make. That’s what makes him the great thrower. And I defer to Chris Sims on this stuff. He’s lived in and around it his whole life. He was an NFL quarterback. his dad was an NFL quarterback and when he raves about Rogers being the greatest he’s ever seen and the problem is yeah, you went to one Super Bowl and and there’s a hell of a story to be told one of these days on why the Packers failed to ever go back to another Super Bowl. They had it against the Seahawks in the 2014 NFC Championship and through, you know, an unprecedented this had to go wrong, this had to go wrong, this had to go wrong, this had to go wrong. They would have gone back and they would have played the Patriots that year. But how can Rogers have only been to one Super Bowl in his entire career when you consider just how effortless and it’s like it’s a lot of Patrick Mahomes, it’s some John Elway, just an arm that is rare and special and I think that’s what set him apart. But but one Super Bowl appearance and a couple of bad years with the Jets and I think he’s just looking for something to end his career that will make people forget about his time in New York. Well, he’s not the best quarterback of all time, but it feels like we wanted to have a designation because of, you know, what he accomplished, but to me it leads to the followup of what he didn’t accomplished. the greatest thrower of the football and then you look at the losses. You know, regular season stats are incredible. Uh what four MVPs, all of those things. I just it’s weird how it’s supposed to be a compliment, but it kind of brings about a Yeah, but feels like he underachieved. Well, that’s right. And that’s why I think he gets sensitive about it and he only wants to say so much about it. Let’s talk about my touchdown to interception ratio and nothing else. Right. and nothing else because let’s not talk about championships. Let’s not talk about Super Bowl appearances. And when you think about the embarrassment of riches the Packers have had at quarterback since Brett Favre replaced Don Macowski during a 1992 regular season game, they go from Favre to Rogers. Now, Jordan Love, we don’t know which way it’s really going to skew for him, but all those years of Favre and Rogers and to have only two Super Bowl wins to show for it when the Patriots got six with Tom Brady. Yeah, you got two and there’s plenty of teams that would love to have one, but man, what a disappointment to have two of the all-time greats and only have two additional championships. Uh, speaking of Pittsburgh, I don’t know if this could be a package deal of Aaron Rogers one one year and Mike Tomlin because now they’re back into the we’re going to need a quarterback that that once you know Rogers leaves and if they don’t let’s say they don’t make the playoffs, let’s say they go uh out in the first round like at some point we can credit Mike Tomlin for being a Hall of Fame coach but just like we’ve done with John Harbaugh in Baltimore more like after a while and and John Harbaugh’s got the league MVP, you know, as his quarterback. So, I I just wonder Mike Tomlin might be getting to that sweet spot of I can go into TV right now and make a whole lot more money and have a lot less headaches and I’m going into the Hall of Fame. Hey Dan, I’ve lived in and around Pittsburgh my whole life and the way the Steelers are behaving this off season is unlike anything they’ve ever done. the contract they gave the DK Madcaf market value for a guy who’s never played for the team before. They have never done that. They only give market value to their own players that they have, that they know, that they trust, and that they believe. And they’re taking a roll of the dice with Metaf. And then they assume the position for two plus months with Aaron Rogers. And I look, I I fully believe that Mike Tomlin knew he was getting Aaron Rogers. They decided it was less of a distraction if he’s not on the team and not at offseason workouts than if he’s on the team and not at offseason workouts. But still, it feels like a level of desperation to end what will be a 9-year streak of no playoff wins. That’s the longest the Steelers have gone between postseason wins since they finally got their first one, December 23, 1972 in the immaculate reception game. So, I feel like there’s a desperation there. And if they fail to win a playoff game this year, what happens next? I don’t think they’ll ever fire Tomlin. Maybe Tomlin will decide it’s time to move on. Maybe the Steelers will decide, you know what, if there’s somebody else out there that wants to give us multiple first round picks, the John Gruden package for Mike Tomlin, maybe we’ll take it. I’m not saying they will, but the level of desperation I’ve seen this year tells me if they fail again, we need to be ready for anything in 2026. Great to talk to you as always. Uh, great work you and Pablo. Thanks for joining us, Mike. Thank you, Dan. See you, buddy. Mike Florio, Pro Football Talk, and his books, Father of Mine and Son of Mine, available in ebook form on Amazon for only 99 cents. We’ll be back. We’ll take your take your phone calls after this.