Brett Favre comes clean on relationship with Aaron Rodgers in tell-all interview
When the Green Bay Packers drafted Aaron Rodgers in 2005, Brett Favre was not keen on grooming his eventual replacement — and he had no problem letting everyone know about it.
“My contract doesn’t say I have to get Aaron Rodgers ready to play. Now hopefully he watches me and gets something from that,” Favre said in an interview with ESPN at the time about mentoring Rodgers.
But the Hall of Famer’s attitude toward his replacement has softened over the years. In fact, they now consider themselves friends.
https://twitter.com/AaronRogersFC/status/1009596028918554624
In an interview Wednesday on the “Wilde and Tausch” show on WTLX-FM in Madison, Wisconsin, Favre said he regularly speaks to Rodgers and the younger quarterback now appreciates where he was coming from.
“We talked about that,” Favre told the radio hosts, according to NFL.com. “He said, ‘You know, remember when I first came in, we’d go out, go watch film together after watching it with the — we’d talk a little bit,’ which we would. He’d ask me what I was looking at or ‘Mind if I watch film with you?’ which of course I didn’t mind.”
“And I was asked frequently by the media about mentoring Aaron or the next guy, I said that’s not my job. He said, ‘I get it now. I get what you were saying or how you carried yourself.’ There is no clause that says, ‘Hey, you groom the next guy who’s going to take your job or else.’ That doesn’t work that way.”
Favre also discussed dealing with getting older and watching friends come and go. Rodgers recently experienced this with the departure of Jordy Nelson, who was released and is now with the Raiders.
“When I was 35 and Aaron was up and coming — first, second year — the only thing we had in common was we both played quarterback for the same team,” Favre said, according to NFL.com. “That was it. He was a very likable guy.
“The place that I was at, at that point, was I’ve seen a lot of guys who I was really close to come and go. I’ve seen a lot of coaches I was very close to, that meant a lot to my career that were here and gone. And so I looked around and even thought I had the most years of anybody on the team, including coaches, I was the odd man out, so to speak,” Favre said on the radio show.
“I guess the moral of this story is if you play long enough, it will happen to you too. And until that moment comes, you really won’t understand it,” he said. Eventually you become the “last man standing.”
“Very few guys get to experience that because of the longevity standpoint,” Favre said, reported NFL.com.
While the lines of communication between the two are open, Favre joked that Rodgers is a hard man to get a hold of at times.
Brett Favre cracks a joke about calling Aaron Rodgers https://t.co/bkImUXSS4Y pic.twitter.com/WGNEGGmnpJ
— Zesty NFL GB Packers (@zesty_packers) June 19, 2018
“I told Aaron, if I do anything, I’m going to get you a phone that works and he kind of chuckled,” Favre told the radio hosts.
“That guy may be the worst at returning messages.”
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