Aaron Rodgers
Aaron Rodgers
Should Aaron Rodgers play in the preseason?
Mike McCarthy reportedly wants to get Aaron Rodgers a healthy number of snaps in the preseason. But should he play? Are the benefits of him playing worth risking having your quarterback injured in a meaningless exhibition? After all, just a few years ago, he tore his Achilles a few snaps into the regular season.
If anybody knows how to run Mike McCarthy’s offense, it’s Aaron Rodgers. Now, he hasn’t run it in nearly a decade, and McCarthy has made substantial revisions and tweaks since then. But isn’t what he is doing in training camp sufficient for that purpose?
The thing is, Mike McCarthy has repeatedly cited player safety and getting to the regular season healthy as his primary reason for not tackling during training camp. So how does playing Aaron Rodgers in the preseason serve that end? Obviously, it doesn’t, and nobody could argue that it does.
Therefore, he must believe that playing Rodgers is really that important, if the report is actually true, anyway. So what does McCarthy need to see from his first-team offense that he can’t see in training camp? Specifically, his first-team offense with his starting quarterback. Because they can give the offensive line plenty of work, regardless of who is under center. The wide receivers can catch passes from anybody, and the running backs don’t care who hands them the ball.
It’s about Rodgers and how he operates the offense, specifically in live action. Granted, this is a new team, and nobody has actually worked together before against an actual opponent. Ideally, you want to experience that before you have to do it for real.
And to be fair, the odds of Aaron Rodgers being injured in the preseason probably isn’t that great. The percentage chance is well above zero, but he could get injured in practice, too. And it’s not just the quarterback they’re looking at. Maybe Mike McCarthy wants to see how the dynamic plays out during games as he calls the plays and relays them to Rodgers. There are plenty of reasons that he might want to do this. But one can still raise the question of whether he should.
The Steelers have a long road ahead of them under Mike McCarthy, along with his cadre of quarterbacks.With seven consecutive postseason losses, and no wins in nearly a decade, they are under fire for their repeated playoff failures. While we have seen many changes, none could dream of topping Mike Tomlin resigning.
We’re already into training camp, with free agency and the draft already reshaping rosters. The Steelers, of course, are used to early offseason mode as a team thatloses by the middle of January all the time. Enjoy the ride, even the turbulence, because it’s the only way we know how to travel anymore.