And so, it seems, this is mostly an infraction we’ll all litigate in our own minds, until the NFL decides to either levy a fine or leak the fact that it had already fined Rodgers for his behavior before Wednesday.
Some may say Rodgers’s purposely intimating that he had received the vaccine, both by saying he was “immunized” and by seemingly drawing a distinction between himself and the players who were not vaccinated, is an example of having his cake and eating it, too. (“There’s guys on the team that haven’t been vaccinated. I think it’s a personal decision. I’m not going to judge those guys,” Rodgers said in August.) He managed to float above the battlefield and avoid the “cancel culture” he has publicly lamented, an artful dodge of the criticism that has befallen Cousins, Wentz and Jackson. Meanwhile, by association, he got to appear publicly at press conferences as a player who had received the vaccine.
Others might say Rodgers may have just been wisely saying as little as absolutely necessary, which he is within his right to do. As high as the NFL’s vaccination rate has climbed, the skepticism among players about its efficacy and long-term issues related to their body is no secret. Especially this summer, some players privately discussed the vaccine more along the lines of a cost of doing business and not a gateway to a safer NFL. Put another way, it would not be surprising if more players, had they the resources, the clout and the willing set of buffers that Rodgers seems to have had throughout the process, may have done the same thing. While some players may undoubtedly bash Rodgers publicly, others may privately applaud him for refusing to play ball.
Along those lines, Pro Football Talk reported that there was a general manager who reached out with a tip that Rodgers was unvaccinated. It would seem players had to have known, given that they were in private meetings with Rodgers, who would have needed to be wearing a mask. Indeed, there must have been an entire locker room and an entire ecosystem of tangentially connected agents, coaches and trainers who were privy to this information and did not find it abhorrent enough to blow the whistle on. If the thought of Rodgers’s potentially catching the virus and exposing his teammates to it was so difficult to stomach, why didn’t anyone tip off the world before Rodgers’s positive COVID-19 test this week?
This is not a satisfying way to wrap up a confusing midweek news cycle. It’s also not a defense of the anti-vaccine stance. Established, renowned scientists with decades of experience have made great efforts to shape our public knowledge of COVID-19, and both the acceptable and unacceptable methods with which to treat it.
But this story has become a Rorschach test placed before us all, and we will never agree on it because we have not found common ground on the vaccine. But the NFL and NFLPA did agree on protocols before the season, and Rodgers made his choice not to get vaccinated with full knowledge of the consequences.
The strangest part of the story remains that a league which giddily spoke of the details of other COVID-19 protocol breaches seems to have been awkwardly silent about or completely blindsided in regard to one of its biggest stars until Wednesday’s revelation. Same goes for all of his teammates, whether because of a locker room code of silence, fewer media availabilities or simply a belief that he had done nothing wrong.
But we know how he was able to avoid the scrutiny reserved for players like Wentz, Jackson and Cousins for eight weeks: because he had seemingly answered the question, so everyone moved on.
It was a failure, it seems, across all the barriers in place for something like this to happen. Now, it’s up to the NFL to figure out a punishment befitting of a decision that so many people willfully ignored, or buried, or hoped would simply never get found out. That is no longer an option.
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