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Steelers' Aaron Rodgers limbo ends before it could get truly white-knuckle

The start of free agency came and went. The draft. Now organized team activities. Surely, Aaron Rodgers can’t skip an entire offseason and just show up for Pittsburgh Steelers training camp.

Right?

Right?

Well, that's right. Rodgers will reportedly officially sign with the Steelers on Friday. If that sounds late, well, it could have been even later based on team messaging back in April, when just a few days before the start of the NFL Draft, both head coach Mike Tomlin and general manager Omar Khan suggested the quarterback room didn’t need to be complete until late July.

“We go to camp with four quarterbacks,” Khan told reporters on April 23. “Right now we have two on the roster. All options are on the table in how we acquire those last two. I assure you we’ll have four when we get to [training camp in] Latrobe.”

Added Tomlin in that same media conference: “In general, when you report to training camp, that’s a line of demarcation for development of a group individually and collectively.”

Full squad minicamp is just around the corner on Tuesday, which is earlier than the date both Khan and Tomlin pointed at when it came to locking in the quarterback room. In some sense, this might have been the plan all along, with Rodgers having visited with the Steelers and presumably explained his offseason intentions on March 21.

Either way, it likely means Pittsburgh freed Rodgers up to be Rodgers — free of deadlines and, to use his own words from this offseason, “open to everything and not specifically attached to anything.”

Of course, when you take that kind of latitude into June, it can lead to some white-knuckling in the fan base, not to mention some critical commentary from some of the Steelers fraternity (see: Terry Bradshaw and Ryan Clark). It also fueled some conspiracy theories that Rodgers is continuing to slow play a signing in a manner that allows the Minnesota Vikings get ample looks at J.J. McCarthy and potentially change their mind about their 2025 quarterback plans. If that sounds like league speculation, it’s because that’s exactly what it was. But that’s what you get when the outside world is looking in and wondering what exactly is going on with Rodgers’ commitment to playing another season.

There's no question about that now, and if Rogers had ended up skipping everything until the start of training camp, his own words would have come back to bite him. Because it was Rodgers who showed up for the New York Jets’ organized team activities in the 2023 offseason, reasoning the decision as one necessary to let teammates know how he operates and communicates. That’s all captured on a May 23, 2023 news conference that is still up on the Jets' team website, encapsulating a smiling, seemingly jovial Rodgers — blissfully unaware of being on the doorstep of the worst two-season span of his career.

Asked by a reporter why it was important for him to be in attendance and working with the team at Jets OTAs, Rodgers pointed definitively at the feeling-out-process that is natural with a new team and new offense.

“With a new offense, being my first year here, I really wanted to be around for at least some of the beginning things to just let them know kind of how I like to do things,” Rodgers told reporters. “Like I said, some of the code words, some of the little adjustments, some of the ways I see the game — sparking that conversation. … Just being here with [the offensive coordinator] to help him put the offense in.”

Two years later, Rodgers has finally decided to take part in that with his new team. Until this point, it seemed like Rodgers' world, with the clocks running on his schedule.

To lean on the words of Steelers owner Art Rooney II, it’s a reality Pittsburgh had to live with “a little while longer.” And thankfully now, no longer than that.

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