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Last April, there was a legitimate, apparently good-faith debate about whether or not Aaron Rodgers would retire from the NFL to become the full-time host of Jeopardy! Rodgers, who had a successful fortnight as one of the show’s rotating hosts, actively campaigned for the job while also seemingly using it as leverage to force the Packers, the only team he’d ever played for, to trade him. He gave a charmingly nerdy interview to The Ringer’s Clare McNear, the expert Jeopardy! reporter who would take down producer Mike Richards just a few months later, in which he hinted that he could play football and still host the show, but his true desire was clear: He wanted Alex Trebek’s old job, and certainly had a good poker face about his willingness to quit football to get it.
Rodgers might have been better off if he had gotten the gig. Since then, he has gone from funny, self-effacing, intelligent would-be Jeopardy! host and State Farm spokesperson to a lying vaccine denialist who, before his game Saturday, told ESPN’s Kevin Van Vaulkenburg “I guess [Biden] got 81 million votes” and saying that people who trust vaccines are suffering from “mass formation psychosis.” It has been quite a turn, to say the least.
At the very least, though, he could always win football games. (He’s likely to win his fourth MVP this year.) But on Saturday night, he came up short in the playoffs again, in shocking fashion, losing to the 49ers after a wild blocked punt that was so unexpected, every player on the field briefly froze in shock. After the game, he looked actively stunned, not just by the loss, but by everything. Fans who loved Rodgers in April were now making “Throw Rogan” and “Breitbart Starr” jokes as he exited the playoffs. State Farm is reportedly reconsidering whether he should be the face of the company. And he might well be the last person on earth, other than Mike Richards, who will ever be Jeopardy! host someday.
So, the alternate history: What if he’d gotten the job? What if he had retired in April and taken over Jeopardy!? Sure, he wouldn’t have won the MVP he’s about to win. But he’d have a steady high-profile gig—he really was good at it—he’d still be seen as the “smart” jock, and it is likely his vaccine status would never have become a public issue. He’d be seen as the player who left his sport early because he had other things he wanted to do. He’d be a Renaissance man—a guy who maybe really was just too smart to be in football forever.
Perhaps if Rodgers had won another Super Bowl, he would have been able to have the last laugh on the “cancel culture” he so decries. Instead, he left Lambeau Field in probably his last game in Green Bay as a punchline. Many people were happier to see him lose this weekend than Tom Brady.
But you know who has had a great pandemic? (Other than billionaires, Amazon, dogs and the manufacturers of Zoloft.) The NFL. COVID-19 hit in March 2020, just after the Super Bowl, and so the league didn’t have to halt its season mid-stream like almost every other major American sport. Tom Brady announced he was leaving the Patriots and joining the Buccaneers later that month. The NFL Draft in April 2020 was the first real virtual sporting event, a massive success, and briefly made the mammoth league (and its lunkheaded commissioner) almost charming. The NFL somehow made it through its whole schedule and even had fans in the stands for the Super Bowl. And the 2021 season, despite the Delta and Omicron waves hitting at its beginning and end, has been a smashing success, with 75 of the 100 highest-rated television programs all year being NFL games.
Heading into the pandemic, the NFL had been dealing with cascading crises, from the blackballing of Colin Kaepernick to the former president screaming that if players kneeled, owners should “get those sons of bitches off the field.” Commissioner Roger Goodell and the 32 billionaire owners he represents tended to make these crises worse, and it wasn’t that long ago that many people (including this idiot) wondered if the sport itself was entering some sort of death spiral. But almost two years into the pandemic, the script has been flipped: The league might just be more powerful than it has ever been.
Weekends like this one are precisely why. Goodell and company may blunder and stumble, and the league at its worst can make you feel gross not just to be a sports fan but also an American, but the trump card it always has are the games themselves. When this game is humming, there is nothing like it.
The first three games of the weekend all ended in last-second field goals with the road underdog winning. Each game felt historic: Cincinnati’s Joe Burrow announced himself as the game’s next big star; the newly polarizing Rodgers fell short in the playoffs again in perhaps his last game as a Packer; and the Los Angeles Rams almost blew a 27-3 lead against Tom Brady and the Buccaneers, only to pull a sudden thunderbolt out of thin air in the closing seconds to win an all-timer of a game … an all-timer that was almost immediately forgotten once the fourth game happened.
The Kansas City Chiefs’ overtime win over the forever-brutalized Buffalo Bills very well might have been the most amazing playoff game of the last 25 years. The teams traded three touchdowns in the final two minutes and still somehow found time to sneak in a game-tying field goal as time expired. (I would have considered this logistically impossible at any other second of my life.) Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen were essentially perfect, and for all the talk of the injustice of the NFL’s overtime rules—which allowed the Chiefs to score the winning overtime touchdown without the Bills ever touching the ball thanks to a coin flip—the true cosmic cruelty was that either team had to lose at all. The only thing that would have been fair would have been to play forever.
That’s what this is, in its rawest form: Escapism. This weekend, and really for the last two seasons, when we have watched NFL games, we have not thought about the league’s problems, or its treatment of players, or its crass commercialism. The NFL, in a way that really only it can do, has provided through the pure kinetic, violent, face-melting intensity of its games, another place to go that is not where we currently are. It allows us to scream, in joy, in despair, in rage … in release. Yes, the NFL gets away with everything. This weekend didn’t just show why we let it. It showed why we’re grateful to do so.
Will Leitch is a contributing editor at New York Magazine, co-host of “The Long Game With LZ and Leitch” podcast, a writer for MLB and Medium and the founder of Deadspin. Subscribe to his free weekly newsletter and buy his novel “How Lucky,” out from Harper Books now.
