The lone Super Bowl win for Aaron Rodgers came against the Steelers, more than 14 years ago. His next shot at a second ring could come against the team he kept from getting its seventh.
The Steelers are the early betting favorites to be Rodgers’s next team. DraftKings has Pittsburgh at 2-1.
The Raiders, who probably wouldn’t help Rodgers get to the top of the mountain in 2025, have 3-1 odds. The 49ers are at +350. (If you trust us on anything, trust us on this — he will not be a 49er.)
Next come the Vikings (please, God, no) at +400, the Titans at +750, and the Colts at +850.
The Rams come in at 10-1, and the Giants are at 12-1. (With the Giants, he wouldn’t have to move.)
The Steelers make the most sense, given the current options and the franchise’s fairly recent year-at-a-time strategy until they find their next long-term option. But, as value goes, the Titans seem to be a compelling choice. Rodgers has long-term ties to Chad Brinker, who currently runs the show in Tennessee and holds final say over all football decisions.
Of course, given Rodgers’s well-documented feelings about the Green Bay front office — where Brinker worked from 2009 through 2022 — some fences might need to be mended, in both directions, to make that happen.
The biggest name in the 2025 quarterback carousel will be Vikings quarterback Sam Darnold. And he’ll likely be making the leap to yet another new team.
Adam Schefter of ESPN.com points to the Raiders as the team to watch in the chase for Darnold.
The Super Bowl Sunday news comes exactly a year after the emergence of news a year ago that the Vikings were targeting Darnold as the replacement for Kirk Cousins.
After failed stints with the Jets and Panthers (due more to the Jets and Panthers than Darnold), he spent a season as the backup to Brock Purdy in San Francisco. During Darnold’s first and likely only season with the Vikings, the third overall pick in the 2018 draft won 14 regular-season starts. That’s the most victories by a quarterback ever in his first year with a team.
For the Vikings, it was a great return for a $10 million investment.
But with two bad games to wrap the season — one with the No. 1 seed on the line and one in the Wild Card round — the Vikings seem to be more content to move forward with 2024 first-rounder J.J. McCarthy, who missed all of his rookie season after injuring his knee in the preseason opener against the Raiders.
Vikings coach Kevin O’Connell told PFT Live on Friday that Darnold has earned the right to become a free agent. Which means that he will. And it also likely means that someone else (whether the Raiders or a different team) will sign him to be the starter.
For a perennial non-contender like the Raiders, entrusting the job to a guy who failed to deliver in the season’s biggest spots is no big deal. In Minnesota, a one-and-done postseason performance is a disappointment. For the Raiders, it would be a massive improvement.
For 15 of the 50 AP voters, the effort to keep Sam Darnold off the comeback player of the year ballot didn’t take.
Last summer, the Associated Press clarified the standard for the award, ostensibly to keep it from going to a player who had a good year after having one or more not-good seasons for reasons other than injury or illness. “The spirit of the AP Comeback Player of the Year Award is to honor a player who has demonstrated resilience in the face of adversity by overcoming illness, physical injury or other circumstances that led him to miss playing time the previous season,” the revised standard explains.
But the language of the clarification didn’t slam the door entirely on a player like Darnold. By including the phrase “other circumstances,” voters could have reasoned that Darnold’s early-career misadventures — fueled by being drafted by the Jets and traded to the Panthers — set the stage for his 2023 experience as the No. 2 quarterback in San Francisco, behind starter Brock Purdy. After Darnold signed with Minnesota for 2024, won the starting job (thanks in part to a preseason season-ending knee injury to first-round rookie J.J. McCarthy), and became the first quarterback ever to win 14 games in his first season with a team, some decided to call it a comeback of the kind that made him eligible for comeback player of the year.
I made him third on my own ballot. Fourteen more did the same. Here’s the breakdown of the other voters who parted ways with the intent of the clarification, by ballot placement.
First place: Mike Jones, Adam Schein, Jonathan Jones, Tony Dungy, Ben Volin, Diante Lee, Jim Miller, Dianna Russini.
Second place: Pat Kirwan, Chris Simms.
Third place: Mike Tirico, Aditi Kinkhabwala.
Fourth place: Tom Curran.
Fifth place: Doug Farrar.
Although Rob Maaddi of the AP explained during the season that Darnold wouldn’t be eligible, the AP eventually confirmed that votes for Darnold would not be rejected. In the end, he received eight first-place votes — more than any player except the winner of the award. Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow received 31.
It’s unknown, obviously, whether Darnold would have generated enough votes to win, but for the clarification. Burrow had a phenomenal statistical season for a team that failed to make the playoffs, after suffering a season-ending wrist injury in November 2023.
And it remains to be seen whether the AP will further clarify the standard in 2025. Simply removing the “other circumstances” catch-all would prevent a player like, say, Broncos quarterback Zach Wilson from overcoming another Jets-influenced early-career slump that caused him to be buried on the Denver depth chart in 2024 before potentially winning a starting job in 2025 and playing at a high level. Likewise, former Giants starter Daniel Jones, who was cut during the 2024 season before landing on the Minnesota practice squad could, in theory, win a starting job and resurrect his career in 2025.
The easy fix would be to limit the award to players overcoming injury or illness. Until that happens, “comeback” will continue to be in the eye of the beholder. This year, 30 percent of the voters believed that Darnold’s comeback was good enough to be one of the five players receiving official votes for comeback player of the year.
The Vikings won 14 of their first 16 games during the 2024 season, but any dreams of a long run into the postseason went up in smoke over the next two weeks.
A loss to the Lions in the final game of the regular season meant they didn’t win the NFC North and a loss to the Rams in the Wild Card round ended their season well short of their goals. During an appearance on PFT Live Friday, Vikings wide receiver Justin Jefferson said that the team thought this was going to be “that year” for the team and that he is confident that the team is “right there.”
Jefferson added that “there’s key things that we need to do, things we need to look into and key moves that we need to make this offseason” before getting a little more specific about where he thinks the team fell short.
“I don’t think it’s really drastic moves,” Jefferson said. “I just feel like it’s just one, two pieces here and there that we need to overcome. I feel like just dominating the way we dominated on the offensive side of the ball — we just need to do it more consistently.”
With Sam Darnold set for free agency and J.J. McCarthy coming back from a torn meniscus in his knee, the Vikings are likely looking at a change at the most significant position on offense as they try to create that kind of consistency. That may not count as a drastic move, but it’s going to be a big factor in what the future holds in Minnesota.
Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell changed defensive coordinators after his first season on the job, but he won’t have to make another change before his fourth season.
Brian Flores’s work with the Minnesota defense was a big reason why the team went 14-3 and it got him interviews for head coaching jobs last month, but he’ll be back in Minnesota after failing to land his second head coaching gig. During a Friday appearance on PFT Live, O’Connell said that he’s confident Flores will get that second chance in the future while making it clear that the duo is looking forward to another year together with the Vikings.
“I can’t speak more highly about what Brian Flores has brought to Minnesota,” O’Connell said. “When we identified him as the guy that we wanted to bring in coming off the 2022 season, he has been fantastic. Scheme, relationship with players, my personal relationship with him, how we build our team. I think Brian Flores should be a head coach in the National Football League. He will be again. . . . But, at the same time, we feel like we’ve got some unfinished business together in Minnesota and we can’t wait to get to work for 2025.”
O’Connell said that he’s “embarrassed to admit” how many times he’s rewatched the losses to the Lions and Rams that ended the Vikings’ season and he and Flores will be focused on trying to make sure that the end of their third season together is a lot happier.
