There is a moment that tells you everything you need to know about how Aaron Rodgers and Mike McCarthy ended things in Green Bay.
It was the 2015 NFC Championship Game, the Packers leading the Seattle Seahawks with five minutes left, and McCarthy calling three straight runs when everyone in the stadium knew what was coming. Green Bay fumbled. Seattle came back. The Packers lost in overtime.
Rodgers stood on that field with the look of a man who had just watched someone drive his car into a wall.
That was not the end. There were three more years of it. Cameras catching Rodgers barking “Stupid call!” at his coach on the sideline in 2017.
Reports of Rodgers regularly audbling out of McCarthy’s play calls at the line of scrimmage so often that McCarthy would call the same play three times in a game and never actually see it run.
One anonymous coach described the dynamic as two ultra-competitive men competing over who had the better call, a power struggle dressed up in an offensive system.
By December 2018, with Green Bay sitting at 4-7-1 and having just lost to the Arizona Cardinals, the Packers ended it. McCarthy was fired on the spot. Thirteen seasons. One Super Bowl.
One of the longest and most complicated relationships in modern NFL history, finished with a press release.
Rodgers went on to win two more MVP awards after McCarthy left. That detail is not incidental. It is the whole argument.
Now, somehow, 42-year-old Aaron Rodgers and Mike McCarthy are working together again. Pittsburgh announced earlier this week that Rodgers is returning to the Steelers on a one-year deal worth up to $25 million guaranteed, with an additional $25 million in incentives.
McCarthy, in his first year as head coach after taking over from the retired Mike Tomlin, made no secret of the fact that he wanted Rodgers back. Rodgers, after an offseason of his usual deliberate silence, eventually showed up to OTAs.
The reunion that nobody saw coming eight years ago is officially happening, and the question everyone around the NFL is quietly asking is whether the thing that broke them apart ever actually healed or whether Pittsburgh just inherited a problem it does not fully understand yet.
An unnamed former Packers player, described by reporter Kevin Dunne as a longstanding pro-Rodgers source who watched the relationship deteriorate up close, was asked recently how this pairing was going to go.
He first joked “Cinderella story, Super Bowl champs” before clarifying he was kidding. His actual prediction was considerably less optimistic.
“They would be at each other’s throats and fighting in no time,” he said. “He saw this up close so I am sure they will say all the right things if they do rejoin forces here.”
What Pittsburgh Walked Into When It Hired Both of Them
Start with what they actually built together, because the résumé is extraordinary and it is easy to lose sight of that in the noise around how it ended.
From 2006 through 2018, Rodgers and McCarthy won 125 games, made nine playoff appearances, reached four NFC Championship Games and won Super Bowl XLV, defeating the Pittsburgh Steelers 31-25 in one of the better Super Bowls of that era.
The irony of that particular championship is not lost on anyone paying attention. The team they beat to win their only ring together is the team they are now both working for.
Rodgers called it one of the greatest moments of his career. Pittsburgh fans watched it from the other side.
Rodgers won his first two MVP awards during those years, in 2011 and 2014, and was broadly considered the best quarterback in the sport.
McCarthy oversaw an offense that gave him the tools and the freedom to flourish. For a stretch of about five years, this was the most complete quarterback-coach partnership in football.
Then it calcified. The offense stopped evolving. Rodgers reportedly grew frustrated with what he described as a vanilla system, predictable in ways that teams around the league had begun to diagnose and defend.
ESPN’s Dom Graziano said the relationship was “absolutely frayed, if not broken” by the time McCarthy was let go.
When the Packers finally moved on from McCarthy and handed Matt LaFleur the keys, Rodgers responded by winning back-to-back MVP awards in 2020 and 2021, the best two-year stretch of his career.
Whatever was stifling him in the final McCarthy years, removing it seemed to work.
McCarthy went to Dallas, where he won division titles with consistency and lost in the playoffs with equal consistency, a pattern so reliable it became a punchline.
The Cowboys eventually moved on. McCarthy landed in Pittsburgh. When the Steelers’ ownership and front office started building their 2026 plan around him, Rodgers was already in the building from the previous season, having led Pittsburgh to a 10-7 record, an AFC North title and a home playoff game that ended in a 24-point loss.
Tomlin’s decision to step away had looked like it might end Rodgers’ time in Pittsburgh too. McCarthy’s arrival changed the calculation.
The official version of this reunion, told by both parties in public, is one of mutual respect and renewed appreciation.
Rodgers has said that the time apart helped him understand what he and McCarthy accomplished together.
McCarthy has been nothing but complimentary about his quarterback when asked. The public posture is fine.
What nobody can fully answer yet is what happens in Week 6 when the offense stalls three times in the first half and Rodgers starts looking at the play sheet with that particular expression.
Or what happens when McCarthy calls something from the sideline that Rodgers disagrees with and the camera catches the exchange on the bench.
The distance between two men who once worked together at the highest level of the game and the memory of how it ended does not disappear because both of them are telling reporters it is fine now.
Rodgers is 42 years old, turning 43 during the season. This is almost certainly his last year in the NFL. McCarthy is on his third head coaching job, carrying a reputation for regular-season competence and postseason fragility that has followed him from Green Bay to Dallas and now to Pittsburgh.
The Steelers are a franchise that has not won a Super Bowl since 2009 and has not come particularly close since. None of those facts individually are disqualifying.
Together they describe a situation with a fairly narrow window and very little room for the kind of friction that once consumed both of these men for an entire season in Wisconsin.
The partnership has produced a Super Bowl. It has also produced some of the most documented dysfunction in recent NFL history.
Pittsburgh is betting that enough time has passed and enough perspective has accumulated that only the first part matters in 2026.
They might be right. They might be wrong. Either way, the answer is going to be very public.
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