Shailene Woodley appears to be coming to the defense of her fiance, Aaron Rodgers, as his battle with the Packers wages on.
To say it’s been a whirlwind offseason for Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers is to dramatically undersell how tumultuous things have been.
The NFL MVP is flat out refusing to play for his team this upcoming season.
Think about the gravity of that statement. Rodgers isn’t merely unhappy with the Packers, or musing about playing elsewhere as a way to get the attention of the front office like Russell Wilson did. He waited until the NFL Draft, when the spotlight was back on football, to request a trade in order to embarrass his team in public.
Ever since Matt LaFluer pulled him off the field on a fourth down play in the NFC Championship Game, the writing has been on the wall for Rodgers. It’s actually been on the wall for roughly ten years, but we don’t have enough time to read it all.
Rodgers has barely stoked the coals directly, as aside from an interview with Kenny Mayne and a few comments at a golf tournament, he’s let the rest of the world make his point for him. That’s what Stephen A. Smith did in the wake of a report that Rodgers turned down a high-paying contract extension this offseason, and it’s what his fiance Shailene Woodley is doing as well.
Shailene Woodley backs Aaron Rodgers in war with Packers
Woodley retweeted a rant by pro-Rodgers rant by Stephen A that slammed the Packers.
“This is proof of what I’ve been talking about for months. It’s not about football. It’s not just about the money,” Smith said. “This is about the way the Green Bay Packers have treated their star player. They have disregarded him, they have dismissed him, they have minimized him, they’ve disrespected him. And he said, ‘Bump y’all, enough is enough.’”
Rodgers requesting a trade and then going AWOL is the culmination of a decade-worth of false starts, broken promises, and unrealized potential. Rodgers has had enough and he’s not going to take it any longer.
And this is what it’s come to. We’re not talking about Rodgers attempting to go back-to-back as MVP of the league, or how the Packers are going to avenge last year’s loss to the Buccaneers. We’ve been reduced to talking about Twitter rants and retweets; collateral damage in a Cold War that shows no signs of ending any time soon.