The game has changed throughout Aaron Rodgers’ 20 seasons in the NFL, and so has the way the game is covered.
Rodgers made his weekly appearance on The Pat McAfee Show Tuesday afternoon. And during the segment, A.J. Hawk asked his former Green Bay Packers teammate to reflect on how the game, players, coaches and personalities have changed throughout his two decades in the league. According to Rodgers, football IQ has dropped, while the skillset of players has improved. The bigger change around the NFL, however, might be the media.
“There’s a lot of people talking about the game now,” Rodgers said. “Both non-former players and former players who are trying to stay relevant fame wise. So the takes and the criticism are a lot different than they were maybe in the mid-2000s.”
As McAfee, a former NFL player turned-prominent media member responded with some curious facial expressions, Rodgers noted he wasn’t referring to the retired punter.
“I’m talking about these experts on TV who nobody remembers what they did in their career,” Rodgers ranted. “So in order for them to stay relevant, they have to make comments that keep them in the conversation. That wasn’t going on in 2008, 2009. The SportsCenter of my youth, those guys made highlights so much fun. And that’s what they showed on SportsCenter. Now it’s all talk shows and people whose opinions are so important now and they believe they’re the celebrities now, they’re the stars for just being able to talk about sports or give a take about sports, many of which are unfounded or asinine, as we all know. But that’s the environment we’re in now.”
Unfortunately, McAfee didn’t ask for names, because Rodgers probably would have given them. Rodgers didn’t say ESPN specifically, but as everyone knows, SportsCenter is on ESPN. In fact, SportsCenter follows The Pat McAfee Show on ESPN, which is the platform Rodgers used to call out sports media’s opinionists.
Perhaps more interesting is the fact that McAfee’s show replaced the noon edition of SportsCenter on ESPN and sparked an apparent power struggle with since-axed executive Norby Williamson. It sounds like Rodgers sides with Williamson in wanting more SportsCenter and less personality-driven shows. Shows like The Pat McAfee Show?
Rodgers is right in saying media coverage of the NFL has changed in the last 20 years. But the media can argue that thanks to the era of player empowerment, some of those asinine and unfounded takes have been eliminated. When there is an asinine or unfounded take it gets amplified on social media more than it used to, but the mainstream media isn’t necessarily dropping harsher opinions on players today than they were two decades ago. More and more of those takes are now also coming from active players, many of whom have their own podcasts or media deals. See: Rodgers.
ESPN certainly isn’t devoid of asinine or unfounded takes, we’ve covered many of them. But one could certainly make the case that if you ranked all the asinine or unfounded takes given on ESPN in the last year, the most egregious ones would be attributed to Rodgers.
