Remembering a Play: Before We All Hated Aaron Rodgers, God of Hail Marys

The surprisingly frisky 2-3 Arizona Cardinals travel to Green Bay to face the 3-2 Packers this weekend, and combined with the New York Jets firing Aaron Rodgers’ head coach Robert Saleh this week, a cool play sprung to mind–technically two plays–as one Hail Mary is not enough for the god of Hail Marys.

Aaron Rodgers is a lot of things, and probably like 30 percent ayahuasca at this point, but boy does he have a knack for pulling a rabbit out of a hat. With a spot in the 2016 NFC Championship on the line in Arizona, Rodgers and the Packers found themselves down seven points, 96 yards away from the endzone with 55 seconds to go. If that wan’t bleak enough, they were practically dead in the water on 4th and 20, until Aaron Rodgers rolled out, flicked his wrist, and hit a 61-yard Hail Mary-ish to keep their season alive.

The Packers would only go backwards from there, and with five seconds left, Rodgers authored an emphatic entry in the legend of the god of Hail Marys. The NFL doesn’t let you embed their videos so here is a link to the broadcast of the play, but below I have found a clip from the stands so you can really feel the crushing weight of this Hail Mary hitting the Arizona crowd.

That catch from Jeff Janus was bonkers, but Rodgers’ throw is still better. Falling away from the pass with a linebacker closing in on him, then launching it into the ionosphere from his own 45 and landing it in the middle of the endzone is just a preposterous display of arm strength.

Apologies to the Arizona Cardinals for not making this Remembering a Play about what happened next, as Carson Palmer and Larry Fitzgerald danced through practically every Packer defender on the opening play of overtime, hitting a chaotic 75-yard catch and run to set up a game-winning shovel pass to Fitzgerald a couple plays later in one of the craziest endings to a game in the history of sports. That play is historic enough to be worth remembering, but it does get overshadowed a bit by the 101 yards worth of Hail Marys that happened right before it.

It’s a shame that Aaron Rodgers has revealed himself to be such an ignorant, obstinate asshole in recent years, because as a player he was an absolute joy to watch in his prime. It’s easy to forget now, what with his Achilles exploding eight seconds into last season and an aging Rodgers in a different shade of green while his current reputation is closer to Joe Rogan than an NFL All-Pro, but he is the only guy to seriously challenge Tom Brady and Peyton Manning’s duopoly atop the NFL. Rodgers never won enough rings to really get himself in the conversation with the two demigods of 21st century football, but at his peak, he may have been better than either given his ability to run while still throwing the ball as good as the two best throwers of all time.

Rodgers’ Hail Marys are genuinely the stuff of legend, as this wasn’t even the only time he did this in a playoff game, as the very next year he hit one at the end of the first half against the New York Giants in the Wild Card Round. He is better at throwing Hail Marys, a play that by all conventional logic should just be a random number generator, than every quarterback ever.

He has actually worked on this skill, consulting with former astronaut and third place finisher in the Veepstakes, Mark Kelly, to learn about the effects the height, wind, temperature, etc…have on the ball high up in the air. Kelly said Rodgers’ “Hail Mary passes are like a spaceship reentering orbit.”

Rodgers’ Hail Mary passes go higher by design, and watching him torment the NFL with what for everyone else, was a harmless play almost every single time, was one of the delights of being a football fan for many years. After these back-to-back-to-back playoff Hail Marys in 2016 and 2017, it felt like Rodgers had discovered a new form of physics, and unfortunately in the years that followed, if you asked him, he’d probably tell you that he did, among many other things that do not exist.