Aaron Rodgers is heading toward what he says will be his final NFL season, and the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback certainly doesn't sound interested in spending it carefully avoiding controversy.
During a recent appearance with his longtime friend Pat McAfee on ESPN, Rodgers was asked about his mindset entering his last year. Instead of offering the usual veteran-quarterback answer about taking things one game at a time, he reached directly into one of America's most contentious political fights.
"I'm going to plead the Fifth. Like that absolute coward Tony Fauci," Rodgers said.
That was only the beginning.
Rodgers has a long and very public history with the COVID debate. During the pandemic, he declined to receive a COVID vaccine and became the center of a media firestorm after previously saying he had been "immunized." The wording left many people with the impression that he had been vaccinated, although Rodgers later explained that he had pursued an alternative treatment.
When Rodgers tested positive for COVID during the 2021 NFL season, criticism came quickly. NBC Sports' Mike Florio called him a "big fat liar" and accused him of running a "scam."
"He deliberately staked out the position that he thought would result in the least scorn and criticism from the media," Florio wrote at the time. "And most in the media were of the mind that you should get vaccinated. So this all goes back to his sensitivity."
Five years later, Rodgers clearly hasn't forgotten any of it.
His latest comments came after Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment repeatedly while appearing before a Senate committee. Rodgers seized on the spectacle and questioned why Fauci would refuse to answer questions after receiving a presidential pardon.
"Are you kidding me? Yeah, 111 times, and you've got a pardon and pleaded over 100 times. What are you scared of, Tony?" Rodgers said. "I thought you were 'I am Science.' And you get up there, and you can't answer a question. I thought you had a pardon there, Tony? Why couldn't you answer one question the entire time?"
Rodgers was referring in part to Fauci's famous 2021 statement that attacks against him amounted to attacks on science because, as he put it, "I represent science."
The quarterback then went considerably further.
"Now, they can't talk about the COVID stuff, because, obviously, it was made in a lab in China; that's not even questionable now. Tony Fauci is an absolute criminal," Rodgers said.
Those are Rodgers' assertions, not judicial findings. Fauci has not been convicted merely because he invoked the Fifth Amendment, and exercising that constitutional protection does not itself establish criminal wrongdoing. The origins of COVID-19 also remain disputed, with competing assessments about whether SARS-CoV-2 emerged through a laboratory-related incident or natural transmission.
But Rodgers' broader complaint was about something he knows particularly well: media scrutiny.
He wondered whether the same press that relentlessly examined his vaccination status had devoted comparable attention to Fauci invoking the Fifth more than 100 times. Fauci's testimony did receive coverage, but Rodgers' point was plainly about the difference in tone and intensity.
That criticism touches an old argument about athletes who wander into politics and public policy.
Rodgers' critics have repeatedly pointed out that he is not a physician, epidemiologist or virologist when challenging his statements about vaccines and COVID. That's a perfectly relevant consideration when evaluating medical claims. Being able to read an NFL defense doesn't confer expertise in infectious disease.
The standard, however, ought to work consistently.
Retired soccer star Megan Rapinoe, for example, has become an outspoken advocate on transgender issues, including the participation of transgender athletes in women's sports. Her celebrity gives those opinions an enormous platform even though athletic achievement doesn't automatically confer expertise in medicine, endocrinology or the complicated policy questions surrounding sex-based athletic categories.
The contradiction isn't that athletes have political opinions. Of course they do, and they have every right to express them.
The problem comes when credentials suddenly become essential only when an athlete says something a particular audience dislikes.