During a post-game press conference following Monday night’s playoff loss to the Texans, Steelers quarterback Aaron Rodgers delivered a rant regarding the perceived presence of now-former Steelers coach Mike Tomlin and current Packers head coach Matt LaFleur on the hot seat.
Rodgers’s hot-seat remarks may have shattered some of the lingering ice between Rodgers and LaFleur.
“I’m speechless,” LaFleur told Mike Silver of TheAthletic.com via text message. “He didn’t have to do that, but he did. [It’s] one of the nicest compliments [of] my life. I’m so appreciative of him for that.”
LaFleur coaches Rodgers for four seasons in Green Bay, guiding him to a pair of league MVP awards. By the time Rodgers was traded to the Jets in 2023, the relationship between LaFleur and Rodgers was strained, at best.
“I mean, this league has changed a lot in my 21 years,” Rodgers told reporters on Monday night. “You know, when you hear a conversation about the Mike Tomlins of the world, Matt LaFleurs of the world, those are just two that I played for, and when I first got in the league, there wouldn’t be conversation about whether those guys were on the ‘hot seat,’ you know, but the way that the league is covered now and the way that there’s snap decisions and the validity given to the, you know, the Twitter experts and all the, you know, experts on TV now who make it seem like they know what the hell they’re talking about, to me that’s an absolute joke.
“And for either of those two guys to be on the hot seat is really apropos of where we’re at as a society and a league, because obviously Matt’s done a lot of great things in Green Bay, and we had a lot of success. Mike T, he’s had more success than damn near anybody in the league, you know, for the last 19, 20 years. And more than that, though, when you have the right guy and the culture’s right, you don’t think about making a change. But there’s a lot of pressure that comes from the outside, and obviously that sways decisions from time to time, but it’s not how I would do things and not how the league used to be.”
The reality is simple. The beast that has helped Rodgers make nearly $400 million during his career has created an appetite for non-stop coverage, reporting, and analysis. And fans of the bad teams expect them to try to change. If owners feel compelled to make changes in order to keep making the kind of money needed to pay the salaries of players like Rodgers, that’s their decision.
Folks in the media are merely trying to figure out not where the pink slips are but where the pink slips are going. Owners who think it’s ridiculous for their coaches to be regarded as being in jeopardy by those paid to cover the league can issue a statement to the contrary, if they want.
In Green Bay, June comments from new Packers CEO Ed Policy created the impression that 2025 would be an up-or-out year for LaFleur. Even now, three days after a postseason collapse against the Bears, the Packers have not said that LaFleur definitely will be back for 2026.
As to Tomlin, the prevailing view by the time the playoffs rolled around was that Tomlin wouldn’t be fired, and that he’d be gone only if he chose to be. (Which is exactly what happened.)
Rodgers’s take was, frankly, erroneous. It’s not the media’s fault that coaches are viewed to be on the hot seat. It’s our job to try to figure out where the inevitable openings (so far this year, nine of 32) will be. And if the NFL’s owners are sufficiently wishy-washy to make firing decisions based on comments from “Twitter experts and all the experts on TV now who make it seem like they know what the hell they’re talking about,” that’s the thing Rodgers should be whining about.
