ESPN’s Marcus Spears: NFL teams waiting on Aaron Rodgers are ‘dumb as a box of rocks’

There have been a lot of opinions shared on Aaron Rodgers and where he might land. Few have been as blunt as the “dumb as a box of rocks” one ESPN’s Marcus Spears shared on a NFL Live show ahead of the first round of the NFL Draft Thursday, though.

There, as part of a discussion around the Pittsburgh Steelers’ quarterback plans and their reported interest in Rodgers, Spears said “I think you are dumb as a box of rocks if you’re waiting on Aaron Rodgers. Any organization in the NFL, you are dumb as a box of rocks if you wait for Aaron Rodgers to tell you if he’s going to play football. …When we went through all of this with the New York Jets, the conversation was that he would make them Super Bowl contenders. He will not put them in the Super Bowl.”

“I think you are dumb as a box of rocks if you’re waiting on Aaron Rodgers. Any organization in the NFL, you are dumb as a box of rocks if you wait for Aaron Rodgers to tell you if he’s going to play football. ” – Marcus Spears pic.twitter.com/9k9ymTQU6T

— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) April 24, 2025

Spears’ colleague Ryan Clark then supports him a bit with “He should understand enough to move in that way, and [Pittsburgh GM] Omar Khan and to me, [Steelers’ head coach] Mike Tomlin, should force him to move in that way or move on.” Host Laura Rutledge then brings up that Rodgers recently told Pat McAfee he hasn’t yet decided what he’s doing (which sparks a “We all are!” from Clark), and then wraps the segment with “Box of rocks, we don’t know.”

While there has been plenty of debate about the merits of waiting for a potential Rodgers decision or moving on (as the New York Jets recently did, much to Rodgers’ chagrin), the suggestion that teams waiting for him are as “dumb as a box of rocks” is an interesting step forward. But that fits with Spears’ overall willingness to say what he thinks.

The widely–lauded NFL Live chemistry here also helped this get discussed as a notable take, but not to the degree of the others ganging up on Spears. And that’s probably fair; there’s perhaps some hyperbole here, but there are legitimate reasons to wonder what Rodgers has left. We’ll see if an NFL team does indeed choose to wait for Rodgers, and if that decision does wind up proving to be of similar intellect to a collection of rocks.