Despite re-writing history, nobody actually loved Aaron Rodgers coming out of Cal

So you have "feelings" about the 2021 draft already?

“Aaron Rodgers Gets a C” Thoughts

He’s in the news, so let’s talk about him for a minute. Besides, if Aaron Rodgers forces his way off of the Green Bay Packers this year, it means that Russell Wilson and every other franchise quarterback in the league who could believe he is worth more than the people making decisions in the front office, should believe it if Rodgers is able to change his surroundings by playing a little bit of hardball.

The Lions played zero ball with Matthew Stafford. When he wanted out after the season, they simply traded him for a first round pick and the burden of carrying Jared Goff + another first round pick and a third. Yes, Detroit knows they are in the early stages of a 2-3 year plan to get competitive, but Stafford could play another eight or nine years and a franchise quarterback can help advance the development of the young players around him.

If Rodgers, Stafford, and Tom Brady all change their home teams in a two-year period, and if Deshaun Watson is the next to go, players like Wilson will begin evaluating the team’s that surround them on a yearly basis. And it will be hard for any franchise to pretend to be good on a yearly basis.

What happens with Rodgers will not only have a significant impact on the NFL in 2021, but on the league for years to come.

When Aaron Rodgers was a year away from joining the NFL as a prospect out of Cal though, nobody would have expected that one day he could have any franchise — let alone the Green Bay Packers — in the palm of his right hand. Coming out of high school in Chino, California, Rodgers was considered undersized and he made it through the recruiting process without any great offers. It’s a story that’s been shared a lot for obvious reasons, but again, Rodgers went to community college and tore it up (helped Butte go 10-1 with a number two national ranking) before transferring to Cal to work with Jeff Tedford in 2003.

A year earlier, Cal went 7-5 with Kyle Boller, a first round pick of the Ravens in 2003. Tedford’s history with developing quarterbacks drafted by the NFL should have been a good thing for Rodgers’ future prospects, but the list of his QBs at Oregon, plus Boller, had the opposite effect: Akili Smith, Joey Harrington, A.J. Feeley, in addition to Boller. As a four-year starter, Boller improved every season and by 2002 had 28 touchdowns, 10 interceptions, and a 53.4% completion percentage (what a different era!), so the Ravens made him the 19th overall pick.

But Rodgers immediately made an impact and was a difference-maker at the position to a much greater degree than his predecessor: 61.6% completions, 2,903 yards, 19 touchdowns, five interceptions, 8.3 yards per attempt. His top receivers that season were Geoff McArthuer (85 catches, 1,504 yards, 10 touchdowns) and Burl Toler, so it’s not as though he was carried by his teammates. That didn’t stop him from being labeled as a “system quarterback” though.

2003’s passing leaders

Then in 2004, Cal improved to 10-2, their best record since 1991. In Rodgers’ only loss of the regular season, he went 29-of-34 for 267 yards, one touchdown, no interceptions in a 23-17 defeat to top-ranked USC. The Trojans would finish 13-0, Pete Carroll’s only undefeated season. Nobody challenged them that year like Rodgers challenged them, at one point completing 23 straight passes, tying an NCAA record.

Rodgers completed 66.1% of his passes for 2,566 yards, 24 touchdowns, eight interceptions, 8.1 yards per attempt. Marshawn Lynch became a part of the offense that year too, but as a freshman he only received 71 carries. That was the most special teammate that Rodgers had during his Cal career and the leading receiver in 2004 was still McArthur.

2004’s passing leaders

This might all sound pretty obvious by now. Not only do we now know that Rodgers is arguably the greatest player to ever stand under center, but there’s been this narrative for 16 years that he was a super prospect who “fell in the draft with zero understanding of WHY or HOW.”

I remember watching the 2005 NFL Draft and I remember the green room attention given to Rodgers. Just as I remember the attention given to Brady Quinn, Johnny Manziel, and many others when it comes to the "unexpected” falls of round one. But I don’t know if anything in the NFL could ever be that surprising.

Even though running backs were much more highly regarded 16 years ago — and you’ll see that the quarterback position wasn’t nearly as close to being defined as the “most important player on the field” — a “true franchise quarterback” prospect would have never made it all the way to 24th overall. Yes, even Russell Wilson was a “franchise quarterback” prospect, even if he was taken 75th overall, but Wilson didn’t go in the third round because the other 31 teams were fine with Seattle getting elite potential at the position.

If anyone knew what Wilson would become, then he would have been regarded in the same light that Zach Wilson was this year. “Yeah, he needs to go two, it’s no question.”

Aaron Rodgers did not qualify in the “he needs to go two, it’s no question” when the draft began — and definitely not by the time the Dolphins used pick two on Ronnie Brown — but he also wasn’t respected by most scouts, analysts, and NFL execs as some surefire prospect whose slide would only prove that general managers are completely clueless. Some GMs are definitely clueless, and most of the ones who passed on Rodgers were eventually fired, but the consensus on Rodgers headed into the 2005 NFL Draft was clear:

“He might go number one, but this is not going to be a great quarterback.”

The 2005 NFL Draft with Alex Smith and Rodgers should always be classified in the same breath as the 2016 NFL Draft wit Jared Goff and Carson Wentz: if this is a quarterback-driven league, then two teams are going to overpay for a quarterback.

In my opinion, based on all the old reports I’m reading, the only reason that experts were surprised that Rodgers fell out of the top-20 was because they expected a team to overpay. Essentially, imagine if this year there had been a draft day media frenzy over where Mac Jones would go after he fell past the 49ers despite the fact that the NFL media felt he shouldn’t even be the number three pick.— most experts have pigeonholed Jones into being a “system quarterback with a limited ceiling” and there are some parallels to draw there with Rodgers in 2005.

At the combine, Rodgers measured in at 6’2, 223 lbs, assuaging most concerns about his size by now. He was also 90th-percentile in hand size, a measurement that has gotten more attention in the years since. The athleticism and measurements had now caught up to his on-field success, productivity, efficiency, and mechanics. Now that I have built up Rodgers as an elite prospect who belonged as the clear-cut number one pick in an NFL draft, let’s see how the reports on Rodgers tore him down.

Here is an article from 4/24/05: “What scouts were saying about Aaron Rodgers” There are 13 quotes about Rodgers and zero of them are glowing. More than zero of them express belief that he will be a bust. I will do a “rotten tomatoes” technique and grade each quote as either “5” (the most glowing) and “1” (“He stinks”).

Marc Ross, Buffalo: "He's a little short. The thing you worry about is those (Jeff) Tedford guys. They don't do anything for a couple years and then they have a good year or two. Who of his quarterbacks has done what they're supposed to do? None of them. Is he just working magic with great college quarterbacks or just manufacturing guys?"

Glowing Rating: 1

AFC scout: "I like him. He's a very talented guy. A lot of quarterbacks that were system people have not done very well. That puts up a red flag. Not that he is one of them. He could be an exception. But I can't get it out of my craw."

Glowing Rating: 4

Rich Snead, Tennessee: "I like him. I just don't know if he's maxed out. He's more accurate than (Kyle) Boller but probably not as athletic. He's a better player than Akili Smith. He's more athletic than (Trent) Dilfer was. He's a little more mobile than Joey Harrington. He had to go to a JC because no one would recruit him because they said he was too small. He's been busting his (expletive) his whole life to get to this point. I just don't know how much more he has to give."

Glowing Rating: 3

NFC scout: "(Alex) Smith is the better athlete."

Glowing Rating: 1

AFC scout: "I think he has some upside although there are some things that are just ordinary about him."

Glowing Rating: 2

Jerry Angelo, Chicago: "I'd give Rodgers the edge (over Smith) just because he was easier to evaluate. And there's a little more arm. But the edge is negligible."

Glowing Rating: 3

NFC scout: "I think he has a good chance of being a bust. Just like every other Tedford-coached quarterback. Thing I struggle with him is he gets sacked a lot. He doesn't have great ability to change the release of the football. He's mechanically very rigid. Brett Favre can change his release point and find different windows. There will be more growing pains with Alex Smith but in the end he has a much better chance to be much better."

Glowing Rating: 1

NFC scout: "The guys that Tedford has had, what have they developed into? They're too well-schooled. So mechanical. So robotic. I don't know if they become good pro players. I think Rodgers is in that same mold."

Glowing Rating: 1

AFC scout: "I don't like him. He's a clone of Harrington and Boller. They all throw the same way. What have those guys done? Nothing. If you take him in the second round, fine. Heady guy. They do a marvelous job of coaching quarterbacks there. I don't think he's as good as the top quarterbacks coming out last year."

Glowing Rating: 1

AFC scout: "I don't think he's in the class of the quarterbacks that came out last year. Strong arm. Pretty good athlete. Still has some holes in his game."

Glowing Rating: 2

Bill Polian, Indianapolis: "I see a guy who has good arm strength. I see some athletic ability. I see a guy who was pretty good with a good team. I see a guy who's in a pretty efficient offense. Am I certain that he's going to come in and lead my team to the Promised Land? I can't say that. I'm not even sure I can say that about Alex Smith."

Glowing Rating: 4

AFC scout: "He's a system quarterback. 3-, 5-, 7-step guy. Can't create on his own. Panics under pressure. Gets flustered easy. I don't think there's a quarterback in the draft worthy of a first-round pick. I'm dead serious. None of them are worth it."

Glowing Rating: 1

NFC scout: "He fit right into the Cal system. He probably executed that as well as anybody. He doesn't have as strong an arm as Boller but can make the same reads and play the scheme as well as Boller did.”

Glowing Rating: 2

Glowing Rating Average: 2

I was also being generous with my ratings on a couple of those 4s and 2s. Is it really that surprising that Rodgers fell out of the top-10 when you consider that these were the reports about him pre-draft? And Tedford had plenty to do with it.

Or at least, the perception of Tedford, the language of which is similar to what you’ve heard in 2021 regarding Ryan Day, Ohio State, and Justin Fields. “Nobody good comes from there.” But Rodgers has proven (as have Patrick Mahomes and countless other QBs) that system and school often get overblown and distract away from the much more important questions about the individual.

Here’s an article from 4/18/05 by ESPN’s Len Pasquarelli: “Tedford’s methods failing QBs in the NFL”

Which begs the question of whether Tedford's latest prize pupil, California quarterback Aaron Rodgers, the likely choice of the San Francisco 49ers with the top overall pick in the 2005 NFL draft, will be more productive than the five that preceded him into the league. That quintet – Trent Dilfer (Tampa Bay, 1994), Akili Smith (Cincinnati, 1999), David Carr (Houston, 2002), Joey Harrington (Detroit, 2002) and Kyle Boller (Baltimore, 2003) – has pretty much flopped both aggregately and individually.

Their collective record as starters is just 98-127, only a 43.6 winning percentage. The group has combined for a completion percentage of 54.6, thrown more interceptions (230) than touchdown passes (202), and posted an anemic passer (in)efficiency rating of 68.6. Dilfer has earned the only Pro Bowl appearance so far among them and owns the lone title, having shepherded the Ravens to a Super Bowl XXXV victory.

Though picks like Dilver, Smith, and Carr don’t help matters, it was probably Boller who did the most to damage Rodgers’ value in the draft.

Consider, for instance, the silly selling point on Boller a few years ago. What was the most intriguing element people kept noting about Boller as the draft drew closer? That from his knees, and 70 yards away, he could throw a football through the goal posts. Yeah, a nifty graphic image as a barometer for arm strength. But far more effective at winning bar bets than football games.

In his two seasons as the Baltimore starter, Boller has looked mechanical and robotic and, not surprisingly, those are two adjectives also used to describe Rodgers.

Tedford does an excellent job, it seems, in programming his quarterbacks. He provides them more facile reads by having created a system that, sometimes even before the snap, eliminates half of the field from the pass-progression process. The offense places a high premium on completion percentage, on making the quick and accurate throws, usually in low-risk scenarios, but seems lacking in big plays and in vertical dimension.

—

Tedford has insisted Rodgers possesses more natural athleticism than his other students who were chosen in the first round. But when you watch Rodgers on tape, he displays all the signature Tedford mechanics, including the manner in which he holds the ball high, up around the ear-hole of his helmet.

The technique is known, in Tedford-talk, as putting the ball "on the shelf." It has yet, though, to put any of his pupils on the top shelf among NFL quarterbacks. And the guess is that Rodgers will struggle as much as his predecessors from the Tedford school have in making the transition to the NFL.

Similar to the 49ers and Trey Lance, the 2003 Ravens and Boller were a match of a really great team with a hole at quarterback and a prospect who they felt they could sit and develop into the franchise’s most-important player. Baltimore had only gone 7-9 in 2002, but they won the Super Bowl in 2000 and went 10-6 in 2001, so the only thing that seemed to be holding them back was Elvis Grbac, Randall Cunningham, Dilfer, Jeff Blake, Chris Redman, and Tony Banks, the six quarterbacks who had started for the Ravens in the previous three seasons.

If the 49ers do end up starting Lance in Week 1 — or maybe at all — keep the Kyle Boller story in mind.

Even though Baltimore should have known that there was work left to be done with Boller — he was terrible in his first preseason — they started him in Week 1 against the Pittsburgh Steelers. The Ravens lost 34-15 and Boller averaged only 3.53 yards per throw with one interception and one fumble. The next week, he went 7-of-17 for 78 yards with one interception and two fumbles. The next week, he went 12-of-21 for 98 yards with one touchdown, one interception. The next week, Boller threw three interceptions against the Chiefs.

It still took five more weeks until the Ravens benched Boller for Anthony Wright, effectively ending the career of Kyle Boller for all intents and purposes.

Yes, Boller started 25 games over the next two seasons and was still in the league by 2011, but he could never overcome being in the right place at the wrong time. So it wasn’t even like Aaron Rodgers as a prospect was even being punished by Jeff Tedford or Kyle Boller.

It was more like he was being punished by Brian Billick and Matt Cavanaugh, the head coach and offensive coordinator of the 2003 Ravens. They deserve a lot more blame for Boller’s undoing than Tedford or Cal do, but nobody brought this up in the lead-up to the 2005 NFL Draft. (Or since, for the most part.)

Similarly, Joey Harrington had plenty of reasons for being a top-tier quarterback prospect after his career at Oregon. Going to the Lions in 2002 with Marty Mornhinweg as the head coach (5-27 in his two years) and Maurice Carthon as the offensive coordinator and Az-Zahir Hakim, Bill Schroeder as the leading receivers, then asking him to play in Week 1 and start by Week 3, did way more to ruin his NFL career than getting tutored by Jeff Tedford in college.

It was lessons like this one that taught the Lions to draft Penei Sewell instead of Justin Fields this year — building up the offense before they plug-in a rookie quarterback — and they’ll be happier for it.

There shouldn’t be any question that if the 49ers had drafted Aaron Rodgers first overall that he might not have ever become “Aaron Rodgers.” It is football-miraculous that Alex Smith lasted until this year. Smith had many of the same questions as Rodgers entering the 2005 draft, he was only 21, the 49ers were coming off of a 2-14 season, and Mike Nolan still had the rookie starting by Week 5.

Smith went 9-of-23 with four interceptions and two fumbles that day. He was benched after going 8-of-16 with one interception and three fumbles the following week.

This is not the fault of Alex Smith’s high school English teacher.

Yes, there are some quarterbacks who can be thrown into the fire immediately, but this doesn’t necessarily make them better quarterbacks or prospects. Take Gardner Minshew, for example. He could handle himself in the NFL as a sixth round rookie, but that’s about all he can do and there is virtually no speculation around the league that Minshew will become a franchise quarterback.

A quarterback prospect like Rodgers seemed to have everything going for him and yet the focus seemed to be on anything other than the statistics, the wins, the tape, the mechanics (no, Terry Bradshaw, Rodgers does not have “bad footwork” because if you wanted to model the perfect quarterback, it would be someone like Rodgers and everything he does), or the athleticism. Mike Nolan, the 49ers new head coach at the time, said that he just didn’t really like Rodgers personality.

I guess 16 years later, maybe Mike Nolan is getting the last laugh. He just had to watch three MVP awards and a Super Bowl win happen for Rodgers first.

One of the only people in the world who expected Rodgers to be available at 24 was Mike Mayock and it was his mock draft that made Green Bay go “Maybe we should scout this guy.” If not for Mayock, the Packers would have been completely unprepared when Rodgers was available at 24 and they might have stuck to their scouting reports on the prospects who they were very high on at the time: S Brodney Pool, S Marlin Jackson, DT Luis Castillo, or CB Fabian Washington.

When people complain that the Packers chose Jordan Love over a “great positional prospect” last year, they fail to mention that sometimes the quarterback is Aaron Rodgers and the positional player is Marlin Jackson. And we know that many late first round picks are underwhelming, regardless of position. Part of me thinks we should only refer to the first 20 picks as “the first round” and then 21-32 should be called “draft purgatory” because they don’t deserve the same classification and expectations.

Of course, this does mean that GM Ted Thompson and the Packers were very high on Rodgers as a prospect since they took him when Brett Favre still had years left to play. Thompson said Rodgers was rated “pretty close to the ceiling” of their draft board and that they turned down a lot of deals when they were on the board at 24.

But the vast majority of draft opinions on Rodgers were lukewarm, room temp, or ice cold. He was labeled as a “bust” well more often than he was labeled as a future Pro Bowler. In fact, I can’t find any draft previews or draft reviews (yet) that called him anything like that, even if some definitely liked him more than Smith. They just didn’t care that much for either and that’s why whoever didn’t go to San Francisco probably would have kept sliding regardless.

I think Rodgers must have benefited from those three years when he got to sit behind Favre. Not only because he was able to get comfortable with a system and with NFL players on both sides of the field, but also because Green Bay sucked in 2005 and then mediocre in 2006. Favre absorbed the blows of going 4-12 when Rodgers was a rookie and then Favre was the quarterback who ushered in the Mike McCarthy era beginning in 2006. Rodgers enjoyed a lot of slack and freedom while the team rebuilt and once Favre led the team to a 13-3 record in 2007, the franchise was ready for the next era because now they were handing the prospect a winning opportunity.

(It wasn’t Rodgers’ fault that they went 6-10 in his first season.)

Now look at where we are in 2021. Like Favre did before him, Rodgers handled the responsibilities of Green Bay’s head coaching transition from McCarthy to Matt LaFleur, and like Rodgers before him, Jordan Love could now step into a starting role for a 13-3 team.

I don’t know where I was going with this but the takeaways for me are that you should never fully trust scouting reports, always be careful what you wish for, and sometimes know when to separate a prospect from a program.

Also, nobody is stepping into a better situation than Mac Jones.