The latest person in sports media to opine about Aaron Rodgers after another absurd week in the never-ending drama around the aging quarterback is Mina Kimes, the ESPN NFL analyst who wrote one of the last magazine profiles of Rodgers nearly a decade ago and who is always willing to zoom out and look at football at the macro level.
In an appearance on The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz on Thursday, Kimes explained that she is not surprised at recent reports that Rodgers may believe the Sandy Hook school shooting was staged. While Rodgers denied the report on Thursday, Kimes said his past views on vaccines and much more mean nobody would be surprised if he did in fact tell a CNN reporter that the killing of elementary school children was a hoax.
But beyond this incident or his potential candidacy for vice president on a ticket alongside Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kimes said Rodgers’ predictible nonsense has made him simply uninteresting.
“What’s now interesting to me, because I don’t think he’s a particularly interesting person anymore because all of this is pretty predictable, is how people react to him,” Kimes said. “What this means for the perception of who he is as one of the faces of the NFL, whether he can be anymore, whether fans can sit with this.”
Still, while Kimes may see Rodgers’ past episodes as disqualifying him from public intrigue, she remains curious about how the average fan responds. After all, Rodgers is the quarterback for one of the most popular NFL teams and is a very public figure. Even if his shtick is played-out, Kimes believes the idea of someone supporting beliefs that resulted in a major media host losing a libel suit for hundreds of millions of dollars should still matter.
“I’m kind of wondering what happens next for him in the public imagination, setting aside the VP aspect of it all, because this is pretty reputation-damaging stuff,” Kimes said. “It should be.”
Rodgers tends to lay low during the NFL offseason, so aside from his post on X on Thursday, the public may not hear from him on this for a while. That is, unless RFK Jr. indeed selects the NFL champ as his running mate later this month.
[The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz on YouTube]
