Perhaps it was all part of a grand plan: The Pittsburgh Steelers’ dreadful 2–5 stretch in October and November. The failure to convert nine consecutive third downs in a loss to the Los Angeles Chargers. The blowout defeat to the Buffalo Bills, during which the Pittsburgh crowd booed the Steelers’ quarterback Aaron Rodgers and chanted for the head coach, Mike Tomlin, to be fired. And the team’s 13–6 loss to the lowly Cleveland Browns in Week 17, during which Rodgers did not reach a hundred passing yards until late in the third quarter. Maybe the idea was simply to ratchet up the pressure, a circumstance in which Rodgers famously thrived.

Rodgers’s ability to deliver when the game was on the line was what drove the Steelers to sign him, Tomlin said, shortly after Rodgers had led a comeback over the Baltimore Ravens in the final game of the regular season, which Pittsburgh needed to win to secure a spot in the post-season. They’d taken the lead for good with less than a minute of game time left, when Rodgers threw a twenty-six-yard touchdown pass to Calvin Austin III, and then held on when the Ravens’ kicker sent a field-goal attempt wide right. The performance was actually anomalous for Rodgers, who has as many fourth-quarter comebacks as Andy Dalton—and vanishingly few against winning teams. But it fit a certain perception of him. Afterward, Tomlin addressed the press and smiled. “This was the vision in the spring when we pursued him,” Tomlin said. “That’s why you do business with a forty-one-, forty-two-year-old guy—a been-there, done-that guy with a résumé like his. He’s not only capable man; he thrives in it. I think he put that on display tonight.” Presumably, Tomlin was referring to Rodgers’s performance in the fourth quarter, when he led the Steelers on two go-ahead touchdown drives—and not to Rodgers’s performance in the first quarter, when he had eight pass attempts for a total of eighteen yards. But, if this was the vision, perhaps those quarters were connected. Some people, apparently, need to suffer to feel alive.

Last season, playing for the New York Jets, Rodgers was one of the worst quarterbacks in the league, near the bottom in stats measuring quarterback performance and passing success rate. Once he was among the most creative quarterbacks in the league when the pocket broke down, with precise, balletic footwork and the ability to throw from any angle to any spot on the field. Now he struggled badly when pressured—which makes sense. He turned forty-one during the season and was coming off an Achilles tear, one of the most catastrophic injuries for an athlete. And he was playing for the Jets, which, by his own frequent accounts—offered in weekly appearances on a podcast hosted by the sports analyst Pat McAfee—were a mess. But no one seemed quite so messy as Rodgers, whose frequent opining on various topics—he fancied himself a freethinker on subjects ranging from DNA manipulation to the existence of extraterrestrial life—made him inescapable, even as his success on the field waned.