Rodgers Reaches the Top of the Mountain
Watching Green Bay win the Super Bowl Sunday, the one thought that stuck with me was the respect I have for the perseverance of quarterback Aaron Rodgers who walked away with a well deserved MVP award.
I remember the 2005 NFL Draft when the Packers selected Rodgers with the 24th pick after he had fallen like a lead balloon to the bottom portion of the first round. In the days leading up to the draft, Rodgers and Alex Smith were considered the two best quarterbacks on the board and both were supposed to go at the top of Round 1 – possibly even 1-2 in no particular order.
On the eve of the draft however, it was Smith, the Utah QB, who figured to go first and that proved to be the case as the San Francisco 49ers grabbed him with the Number 1 overall pick.
But Rodgers inexplicably fell…and fell…and fell some more till he was the last person left in the so called ‘Green Room’ – the place where they put all the potential top picks to get great reaction shots as their lifelong dreams are realized.
They get down past the 20th pick, and there’s Rodgers all alone with kind of a stunned look on his face, and you just couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. And when he finally got taken, with 24th pick overall, it was by Green Bay, where his reward would be sitting behind Packer icon Bret Favre until Favre decided to retire….which as history ultimately proved, wasn’t anytime soon. So much for coming in and starting right away which was what the pundits figured was going to happen with Rodgers.
But it has become obvious that there’s a little more to Aaron Rodgers than meets the eye. This is a guy who was totally overlooked coming out of high school and was forced to go a community college to get a chance to start. It paid off as he later wound up at the University of California, where he eventually became a star. And then the very public Draft humiliation occurred.
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