The cameras just kept showing him. Over. And over. And over. And over. On and on Aaron Rodgers’ excruciating green room wait went, and the ESPN and NFL Network cameras were there all the while through all four-and-a-half hours he spent waiting to hear NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue step to the Jacob Javits Convention Center podium and call his name during the first round of the NFL draft.
And when his name finally, mercifully, was said—“With the 24th selection in the 2005 NFL Draft, the Green Bay Packers select Aaron Rodgers, quarterback, California”—the cameras were on him, too, catching the 21-year-old Rodgers as he spoke on a silver Motorola Razr phone with Packers general manager Ted Thompson, who was telling him at the time that he thought perhaps some “divine intervention” had led Rodgers to the unlikeliest of NFL homes. “They gave me a free phone, which at the time was a Razr. Remember the Razr? It was like the coolest thing possible,” Rodgers recalled with a laugh in a 2018 interview. “It had a 917 number, so I was like, ‘I’ve got a New York Razr phone. This is pretty awesome.’”
But perhaps the most awesome moment that night came shortly thereafter from another moment captured on tape. Only this time it wasn’t one of the major sports networks. It was Dennis O’Donnell, the sports director at KPIX-TV in San Francisco, holding out his CBS5 microphone. He asked Rodgers: “How disappointed are you that you will not be a 49er?”
“Not as disappointed as the 49ers will be that they didn’t draft me.” That’s what Rodgers said. Thirteen words delivered with the undeniable, motivated seriousness that has come to be one of the Packers quarterback’s defining characteristics.
Although there have been others, whose slights have fueled him—the Purdue assistant coach who sent him that rejection letter (“Good luck with your attempt at a college football career”) and that California-Berkeley food appreciation professor who laughed at his NFL dream (“You will never make it”)—the San Francisco 49ers will forever hold a special place on the list.
Having grown up as a 49ers fan in Northern California, attended nearby Cal, and been given the impression in the weeks leading up to the draft that the 49ers were going to take him No. 1 overall, Rodgers thought he was headed to the team he’d cheered for as a kid. Instead, they took another quarterback—Utah’s Alex Smith. “That interview was right after I did my interview at the podium back behind the green room. I’d been picked probably 20 minutes earlier. It was an emotional day, a long day,” Rodgers explained after watching a clip of the interview on YouTube. “At the time I wanted to play right away that day and prove the other 22 teams that passed on me that they’d made a mistake. I look at it differently now. This is where I would have wanted to be had I known then what I know now—about the kind of working environment that this is, the opportunities I would be given, the coaching staff that was going to be here. I mean, I interviewed with Mike McCarthy. He was in San Francisco.”
Yes, yes he was. McCarthy, the Packers head coach from 2006 through 2018, was the 49ers offensive coordinator under then-head coach Mike Nolan, who ultimately made the call to take Smith over Rodgers. “If they pick me, both our lives are changed,” Rodgers said of McCarthy, who replaced Mike Sherman as Packers coach in 2006. “What would have happened had they picked me and things been different? I don’t like doing the whole what if game. I just know I’m really glad that I fell into God’s Country here in Wisconsin and had the opportunity to spend my early years the way I did and now gotten the opportunity to be the starter and play for this team.”
So says the same guy who stepped to the microphone at the NFL Honors event on the eve of the Super Bowl in February 2012 to accept his first NFL MVP award from presenter Peyton Manning, looked out into the crowd, and saw those 49ers heroes he’d pretended to be in his backyard—quarterbacks Joe Montana and Steve Young and wide receiver Jerry Rice—and acknowledged them before adding with a sly grin, “Big Niners fan as a kid. Thanks for drafting me.” Of the acceptance speech, Rodgers said: “That was more of my attempt at a little humor. I was a little nervous up there with Peyton Manning and everybody looking at me. I just don’t always do great in those situations.”
There’s no denying that Rodgers’ success in Green Bay has brought perspective. But to those who know him best, who know all about his grudges and chips and motivational techniques, they are unanimous: there’s no way on God’s green earth that Rodgers has simply moved on from his draft disappointment. “Certain people, I don’t think they ever forget. But that’s not something he’d ever admit,” said longtime Packers linebacker A.J. Hawk, one of Rodgers’ closest friends. “If that’s what drives you, great. Some guys are driven by money. Some guys are driven by championships. I think Aaron wants everything. He wants to win the most championships, but I think a lot of guys carry stuff like that around. I would never fault anybody for whatever motivates them. Whatever drives you, man, that’s your deal. You think about it: all of us have had people in our lives who told us we couldn’t do something. Even if you grew up in a country club behind some gates, you still had people tell you [that] you couldn’t do something. We’ve all had that.”
Added wide receiver James Jones, another of Rodgers’ friends and a player who grew up in the Bay Area: “If you’re an athlete and you’re competitive and they take another guy over you, I would hope you would want to knock that team out every time you play them. I’m sure he has that in the back of his mind each time. If you felt like you should’ve been the first pick in the draft and you felt like you should have been with the Niners, I’m sure anybody with pride wants to play well against them.”
While Smith played for the 49ers immediately, Rodgers, of course, served a three-year apprenticeship behind Brett Favre, a legend who wasn’t particularly interested in mentoring and might’ve even been a bit insecure—at the very least, ticked off—about the whole thing. Then came the surreal summer of 2008, when Favre called it a career, changed his mind, and divided the football-loving Packers fanbase. Little did the fans who pleaded for the team to let Favre have his old job back—and keep Rodgers on the bench or send him elsewhere—realize that Rodgers would become a multi-MVP winner and lead the 2010 team to the Super Bowl XLV title with a playoff run rarely seen at the quarterback position.
Thompson, in his humble way, would never claim that he saw all that coming. In fact, he didn’t even see Rodgers’ draft day free fall coming. In the days just before the draft, the then-first year general manager began to hear rumblings. Not only was Thompson hearing that the 49ers were planning to take Smith, but also that Rodgers might fall. Maybe not to No. 24, but it was not out of the realm of possibility. So Thompson, having always believed in doing due diligence on every draft-eligible player—even ones he was not expecting to be available when his team goes on the clock—went back to his Lambeau Field office with senior personnel analyst John Schneider and began taking a closer look at Rodgers.
The Packers had Rodgers on their board with a high first-round grade and they’d done the requisite reports on him just as they had on all the other prospects that year. But now with the seemingly far-fetched idea of him falling to them no longer quite so unfathomable, Thompson wanted to be sure. And he liked what he saw. “Now, did we think he was going to be there when we were watching tape? No,” Thompson confessed on draft day. “But over the course of the last week or so, there was a couple of [reports] that said maybe he might get there. So I went back and did a little more work just to make sure. I feel very comfortable that this kid warranted being picked where we were at.”
A decade later, when asked if he thought he was taking a future Pro Football Hall of Famer, Thompson chuckled. Of course not. All Thompson was sure of was that he was taking the best player available on his board. “It sounds silly to keep repeating myself, but we really and truly wanted to take the best football player on the board,” Thompson said. “And we felt like he was the best football player on the board.”
The Packers actually had Rodgers rated higher than Smith on their draft board after director of college scouting John Dorsey, West Coast scout Sam Seale, and then-offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Tom Rossley all had been impressed with him at the scouting combine and in visits to the Cal campus. Smith, they felt, was ill-equipped for the NFL level after playing in a spread offense at Utah. Though he was athletic, they felt he locked onto his receivers and wasn’t as NFL-ready.
They also knew that—while some teams were scared off of Rodgers by the failures of previous Jeff Tedford-coached quarterbacks at the NFL level—Rodgers had a special quality they felt made him different than the rest. But no one thought Rodgers would actually fall to them at No. 24. “We didn’t really anticipate being able to select Aaron, but we kept hearing the different rumor mills saying that he might drop out of the top 10, drop to 15, that kind of thing,” Thompson said. “I’ll say this, we didn’t do hardly any study on Alex Smith because it was our understanding that there was no way he was going to get to us. But the closer you get, the more you think, Hey, this might happen. And once you get really close, you really start thinking that it’s a possibility. When it got to be our pick, I was sure that was the pick we should make—the best value pick on the board by far.”
Draft Studs
Reasonable fans can argue whether Aaron Rodgers represents the greatest single draft pick in Packers’ franchise history, but it would be hard to dispute it was the most impactful.
When Rodgers fell to the Packers with the 24th pick in Ted Thompson’s first draft, the Packers already had a Hall of Fame-caliber quarterback in Brett Favre. By selecting Rodgers the Packers unknowingly laid the groundwork for both Favre’s messy departure and their next Super Bowl title. As important as Rodgers and fellow draftee Nick Collins were to the team, the 2005 draft cannot be called the best top to bottom in franchise history.
That distinction belongs to the Class of 1958. In the spring of 1958, the Packers used their first-round selection on Dan Currie, a linebacker who became a solid seven-year starter but was completely overshadowed by the men who followed him. Green Bay took fullback Jim Taylor in the second round out of Louisiana State; he went on to be its all-time leading rusher and a 1976 inductee in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. A round after taking Taylor, the Packers selected linebacker Ray Nitschke from the University of Illinois ,who anchored the defense for 15 years and entered the Hall of Fame in 1978. In the fourth round, the Packers took guard Jerry Kramer, an 11-year starter and Hall of Famer.
Jack Vainisi, who was hired as a scout by Gene Ronzani in 1950 and later served as Vince Lombardi’s scouting director and personnel man, presided over those picks with help from Lisle Blackbourn. Their work helped set the foundation that won five titles in a seven-year stretch beginning in 1961. Vainisi suffered a heart attack at the age of 33 and died in 1960 before the championship run began, but he was pivotal in that draft. “I loved Jack Vainisi; all the players did,” said Paul Hornung, who came to Green Bay from Notre Dame in 1957. “He even got along with Lombardi. He was a football man; that’s what he was pure and simple. He brought so much talent to Green Bay.”
Here is a look at other notable Packers’ drafts:
1956—The Packers took future Hall of Fame offensive lineman Forrest Gregg in the second round, bolstered the line by snagging Bob Skoronski in the fifth round, and got defensive back Hank Gremminger, an eight-year starter, in the seventh round. Oh, and they also took a 17th-round flyer on a quarterback from Alabama named Bart Starr.
1963—Vince Lombardi wasn’t exactly a bystander in the draft. He had plenty of input, and this was his top class. Dave Robinson, a linebacker from Penn State, was picked in the first round and became a Hall of Famer. Lionel Aldridge was a fourth-round pick, and safety Tom Brown (second round) and tight end Marv Fleming (11th round) were huge contributors to championship teams.
1995—In what likely will go down as Ron Wolf’s best Packers draft, the Packers snagged cornerback Craig Newsome in the first round and went on to add fullback William Henderson, linebacker Brian Williams, wide receiver Antonio Freeman, and guard Adam Timmerman.
2000—Wolf found five starters in this draft, including future Pro Bowl tight end Bubba Franks and bookend tackles Chad Clifton (second round) and Mark Tauscher (seventh round), who combined to start for 23 seasons. Fourth-round pick Na’il Diggs played a half-dozen seasons, and fifth-round defensive end Kabeer Gbaja-Biamila set the team’s all-time sack record at 74.5.
1978—The Packers didn’t have much success in the 1970s and ’80s, but this draft by Bart Starr produced future Pro Football Hall of Famer James Lofton along with Wisconsin-born John Anderson and Mike Douglass, gritty linebackers who played their way into the team’s Hall of Fame.
If you want to consider the worst first-round draft picks in team history, you could start with offensive tackle Tony Mandarich, a bust in 1989; Jamal Reynolds, the 10th overall pick in 2001 who lasted 18 games; Jerry Tagge, the Green Bay native drafted in the first round by Dan Devine in 1972; or quarterback Rich Campbell (sixth overall in 1981).