Ayahuasca sipper and podcast activist. Turn on “Sunday Night Football” between 2014–21, and you’re bound to hear the words, “Aaron Rodgers throws to Davante Adams for 6.”
After awing fans and enraging other fanbases for nearly any reason under the sun, there is plenty of noise around this Green Bay Packers, New York Jets and now Pittsburgh Steelers starting quarterback.
Aaron Rodgers endured a humbling draft-day wait, but that did not stop the play caller from rising to fame. In 2008, after 3 seasons behind Brett Favre, Rodgers earned the starting roster position for the Green Bay Packers. The gunslinger logged over 4,000 yards in his inaugural season as starter, almost instantly placing him in contention for MVP. The 2010 NFL season, however, is when Rodgers truly came to blossom, earning a 31–25 victory in Super Bowl XLV.
The Packers’ winning seasons were never-ending in the 2010s. Green Bay became the envy of the NFC North. While the Packers consistently excelled under Rodgers’ long tenure, his career has certainly not been without wild and controversial moments off the field, especially in recent years.
Fans criticized the four-time MVP winner in 2018 after he failed to contact his mother during a wildfire outbreak in California. He has since appeared on a slew of podcasts, where he confused audiences about his COVID-19 vaccination status and peddled misinformation about his toe fracture. With his on-field performance slowly diminishing alongside mounting controversy off-the-field, the Packers were determined to offload the baggage that the play caller brought to another organization. After another unremarkable season, the Jets took Rodgers on, hoping to squeeze value out of his final years, operating in their ‘win now’ position.
Rodgers’ move to follow in the footsteps of Brett Favre to Florham Park was confirmed in 2023. To say his first year with the Jets was disappointing would be a massive understatement: Rodgers injured himself four snaps into the 2023–24 season. Winning was then on the back burner. In 2024, the Jets tried again, assembling all the crucial organizational pieces it believed could deliver a championship — including reuniting Rodgers with friends such as Davante Adams. Even still, the Jets amassed a measly five wins and the organization cleaned house this offseason, with moves including firing general manager Joe Douglas.
‘Hate Index’ Ranking
Whether you personally feel a nostalgic appreciation or a lingering hatred for the man, sentiment analysis from text-based platforms such as X and Reddit shows comments regarding Rodgers to be overwhelmingly positive. After performing big data techniques on user reaction websites, using a program I wrote to scrape over 1,000 posts over five years, Aaron Rodgers earns a Hate Index ranking of 18.0 (on a scale of 0 to 100) when compiling the top 10% of the ‘most negative’ posts about him. Whether you find the positive sentiment of Rodgers surprising or not, over 85% of posts contained positive attitudes towards the player.
Rodgers has certainly built a hateable reputation over the past two decades in his football career, but it appears that, overall, viewers value Rodgers’ on-field Hail Marys more than they resent the wild personal controversies he has never shied away from airing in the public.
After being released from the Jets, Rodgers said he was doing what “was best for [his] soul,” finding what is likely the final starting job of his career under Mike Tomlin’s Steelers. Although he has managed to stir up plenty of controversy with fans of the game, his love of the game has never waned. Now taking the field for his 21st season — a career almost longer than some of his fellow players have been alive — Rodgers remains one of the NFL’s most polarizing figures.
