Perhaps it was all part of a grand plan: The Pittsburgh Steelers’ dreadful 2–5 stretch in October and November. The failure to convert nine consecutive third downs in a loss to the Los Angeles Chargers. The blowout defeat to the Buffalo Bills, during which the Pittsburgh crowd booed the Steelers’ quarterback Aaron Rodgers and chanted for the head coach, Mike Tomlin, to be fired. And the team’s 13–6 loss to the lowly Cleveland Browns in Week 17, during which Rodgers did not reach a hundred passing yards until late in the third quarter. Maybe the idea was simply to ratchet up the pressure, a circumstance in which Rodgers famously thrived.

Rodgers’s ability to deliver when the game was on the line was what drove the Steelers to sign him, Tomlin said, shortly after Rodgers had led a comeback over the Baltimore Ravens in the final game of the regular season, which Pittsburgh needed to win to secure a spot in the post-season. They’d taken the lead for good with less than a minute of game time left, when Rodgers threw a twenty-six-yard touchdown pass to Calvin Austin III, and then held on when the Ravens’ kicker sent a field-goal attempt wide right. The performance was actually anomalous for Rodgers, who has as many fourth-quarter comebacks as Andy Dalton—and vanishingly few against winning teams. But it fit a certain perception of him. Afterward, Tomlin addressed the press and smiled. “This was the vision in the spring when we pursued him,” Tomlin said. “That’s why you do business with a forty-one-, forty-two-year-old guy—a been-there, done-that guy with a résumé like his. He’s not only capable man; he thrives in it. I think he put that on display tonight.” Presumably, Tomlin was referring to Rodgers’s performance in the fourth quarter, when he led the Steelers on two go-ahead touchdown drives—and not to Rodgers’s performance in the first quarter, when he had eight pass attempts for a total of eighteen yards. But, if this was the vision, perhaps those quarters were connected. Some people, apparently, need to suffer to feel alive.

Last season, playing for the New York Jets, Rodgers was one of the worst quarterbacks in the league, near the bottom in stats measuring quarterback performance and passing success rate. Once he was among the most creative quarterbacks in the league when the pocket broke down, with precise, balletic footwork and the ability to throw from any angle to any spot on the field. Now he struggled badly when pressured—which makes sense. He turned forty-one during the season and was coming off an Achilles tear, one of the most catastrophic injuries for an athlete. And he was playing for the Jets, which, by his own frequent accounts—offered in weekly appearances on a podcast hosted by the sports analyst Pat McAfee—were a mess. But no one seemed quite so messy as Rodgers, whose frequent opining on various topics—he fancied himself a freethinker on subjects ranging from DNA manipulation to the existence of extraterrestrial life—made him inescapable, even as his success on the field waned.

How much of his declining skills—or growing media presence—actually mattered to what he might contribute to the Steelers? Tomlin had previously demonstrated an inexplicable ability to lead teams to wins with terrible offenses. His Steelers had won games with Mason Rudolph and Duck Hodges at quarterback. They had made the playoffs with Kenny Pickett and Mitchell Trubisky as starters. Last season, Tomlin benched Justin Fields for Russell Wilson, who took the team off a cliff in the last four games of the regular season—and the Steelers still finished 10–7. But, coming into this year, the Steelers had lost six straight playoff games, and they haven’t won during the post-season since 2016. For years, people have whispered that Tomlin was near the end of his tenure. And it’s possible to see something a little desperate in the Steelers’ pursuit of Rodgers. But Rodgers is also a four-time M.V.P. award winner, a future Hall of Famer, a model for the modern quarterback. And he could still, on occasion, flick a long spiral up the seam and hit a receiver in stride, the kind of throw that seems to turn chaos into perfect, thrilling order. Rodgers had already declined the chance to be Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,’s running mate during the 2024 Presidential campaign, he said, because he wanted to keep playing. And the whole Jets thing hadn’t worked out. He needed a job. And Tomlin needed a quarterback.

Perhaps the vision wasn’t the result of a bad burrito, or of taking ayahuasca with Rodgers on one of Rodgers’s spiritual quests. Perhaps there was something logical about it. It seemed that way for a while. The Steelers started the season 4–1. Rodgers began the season by laughing at his old team, the Jets, scoring four touchdowns. The Steelers beat the New England Patriots (one of only three teams to do so all season) and then went to Ireland to beat the Minnesota Vikings. They lost to the Cincinnati Bengals—who, with their star quarterback Joe Burrow injured, employed another fortysomething, Joe Flacco—but Rodgers put in a vintage performance, with four touchdowns and nearly a fifth, a Hail Mary attempt that flew sixty-eight yards through the air before it was batted down. He’s still got the arm, at least some of the time.

But not the legs, it seems. No one this season got rid of the ball faster than he did, whether the situation seemed to call for a quick pass or not. Only one wide receiver, DK Metcalf, had Rodgers’s obvious trust; his targets were often the Steelers’ running backs, closer to hand. That Hail Mary was an anomaly: no other quarterback’s completions travelled a shorter distance, on average, past the line of scrimmage. And when the pocket broke down, he usually crumbled with it. Yet there he was, in the final moments of the regular season, with his arms triumphantly raised.

Was he responsible for bailing his teammates out under pressure, or for putting them in trouble to begin with? Rodgers is football’s Rorschach test, one of the league’s most polarizing players. It’s a role he seems comfortable in; it fits with his contrariness, and provides an ongoing relevance. The Steelers finished the season with their usual 10–7 record. (Maybe Tomlin’s vision was actually for more of the same.) On Monday, in any case, he’ll get another chance to finally win a big game: the Steelers host the Houston Texans during the wild-card round of the playoffs, with the winner advancing. It will be Rodgers’s twenty-second playoff start; his first came when the Texans’ quarterback, C. J. Stroud, was eight years old.

The Texans are a flawed and beatable team, but they have one of the league’s best defenses, which means that it won’t be an easy night for Rodgers, most likely. But when has Rodgers ever made things easy? Before the start of the season, he said that he was “pretty sure” he’d retire after it was over. But after the Ravens game, he refused to close the door on his career. Who knows what visions may lie ahead? ♦