Aaron Rodgers. – Credit: Getty Images

Ladies and gentlemen, it appears Aaron Rodgers, who’s taken a grand total of four snaps as quarterback of the New York Jets, has lost his mind.

This week, during his weekly appearance on ESPN’s The Pat McAfee Show (or if a WWE wrestler on bath salts hosted a sports program), he sorta accused Jimmy Kimmel of associating with Jeffrey Epstein — exacting revenge against Kimmel for ragging on Rodgers and his public Covid vaccine skepticism in his late-night monologues. This latest outburst follows a string of recent kooky behavior, including receiving a homeopathic vaccine alternative as a way of “immunizing” (his words) himself against the virus, dabbling in 9/11 trutherism, going on McAfee’s show every week behind the ugliest webcam setup you can possibly imagine and saying ridiculous crap like “woke mob” and “Alphabet Mafia” on The Worldwide Leader in Sports, embarking on darkness retreats to help make major life decisions, and, worst of all, signing with the New York Jets. Didn’t he see what happened to his mentor, Brett Favre?

More from Rolling Stone

• Taylor Swift Supports Travis Kelce in Wild Card Game at Arrowhead Stadium
• NFL Livestream: How to Watch the 2023-24 Football Season Online Without Cable
• Judge Orders Trump to Pay New York Times Over Bogus Lawsuit

Once Aaron was, by all appearances, a nice man with a cannon for an arm. He had his hobbies. He was surprisingly good at Jeopardy! He was nice to people. He had famous girlfriends. Then a bunch of stuff happened in his life, and in the lives of everyone, and he lost the thread little by little, week after week.

So, why did the most talented quarterback of his generation lose the plot and book himself a weekly gig spouting conspiracy theories on a cheap sports talk show hosted by a guy wearing a black tank top?

What follows is an index of possible reasons.

Disappointment.Aaron Rodgers was, by many metrics, the best NFL quarterback who’d ever lived. Four Most Valuable Player Awards, the best touchdown-to-interception-ratio of all time. He could work in the backfield if necessary, slung the pigskin downfield when he had to, could make any throw you needed at any time, and basically never missed the playoffs.

Considering all this, his postseason achievements have been… slight. He won a single Super Bowl, in 2011, and then proceeded to ply his trade for disappointing Green Bay Packer squads of every shape and size. A 15-1 squad in the regular season, crucified by Eli Manning and the Giants. A loss to the demon Tom Brady, plying his trade for Tampa Bay. Ground into dust by a world-historic Seahawks pass defense. Over and over, Aaron would play like God, and over and over, the rotten Green Bay Packers would let him down. A defense that doesn’t work, receivers who can’t create, the worst running game you’ve seen in your life. Disappointment, year after year, and it was never his fault. The Packers were just not up to the task of supporting the best quarterback who’d ever lived.

It stands to reason that the parade of indignity that visited Aaron during the biggest moments of his public life might have eaten away at him. Made him on edge. Conspiratorial. Disappointment can’t become your way of life, not when you’ve spent it forging yourself into a football-slinging machine. It needs to be something else, something… mysterious working against you. Soon, your whole mindset is overcome by this fear, and boom, you find yourself in a sweat lodge, seeking the holy cure for Covid-19.

In Doppelganger, her book (in part) about feminist firebrand-turned-online wacko Naomi Wolf, author Naomi Klein suggests that Wolf’s descent into conspiracyville came from the failure of the political project she worked in, Clintonian liberalism. Bush won against milquetoast Al Gore, made things way worse, Obama did very little to contend with the degradation of American civil society, and disappointment with her team metastasized into a broader paranoia about the lever-switching forces that dominated the world. The same thing might have happened with Rodgers, but instead of the shithouse of American life presided over by Donald Trump, it was just the shithouse of the Green Bay Packers, presided over by Mike McCarthy.

Covid.Covid made everyone lose their minds and I don’t think Aaron was exempt from that. It still makes everyone nuts, so nuts that we don’t even want to talk about it anymore. Aaron went into that hell a little eccentric and left having “done research” and lost his marbles. Him and thousands of other people, you know? John Stockton was the least demonstrative NBA player of all time and he buckled under the pressure. Though not everyone can go on ESPN and challenge Dr. Fauci and Taylor Swift’s boyfriend to a vaccine debate.

Trump.Rodgers hasn’t quite crossed the Trump Rubicon yet, but you don’t really need to, do you? Trump put something in the water and millions lost it in all kinds of directions. He is the clown doctor, we are the patients, America is an asylum, and only the third impact can reset the national consciousness and free us from the Aaron Rodgers living in all of our minds.

See? It doesn’t take much. The truth is so powerful it can hollow out your brain and build a little tunnel system for worms to live in.

Breakup. A normal man getting divorced or breaking off an engagement fires up cigs like it’s the end of the world. I’ve seen it; it’s absolutely terrifying. One after another, three gigantic puffs and then dumped in the ashtray. Anything to seek one second of comfort while everything you had planned for your life slips away from you.

Rodgers is an athlete though, so he can’t do that. When he and Shailene Woodley broke off their engagement in 2022, he needed to find a less productive outlet for all that anxiety than smoking cigs. So, like many men before and after him, he got into drilling Internet shit into his head all night and talking about it with his friend on a podcast. It’s just that he was Aaron Rodgers, and the podcast where he appears is now on ESPN. These are the woods of divorce: the light at the exit is always moving, the darkness just gets deeper and deeper.

Epstein. OK, look: accusing Jimmy Kimmel of cavorting with Epstein is really dumb and irresponsible, but when you learn anything about Epstein your brain does break a little. It’s like a Lovecraftian nightmare where the more you read it the more insane you go. Did you know that Ghislaine Maxwell could pilot a submarine and appeared at the U.N. to promote her ocean conservation organization in 2014? How could anyone not know what was going on there? And how deep does it all go?!

See? It doesn’t take much. The truth is so powerful it can hollow out your brain and build a little tunnel system for worms to live in.

Pat McAfee. A few months back, ESPN laid a bunch of people off — Neil Everett, Jalen Rose, Jeff Van Gundy, Suzy Kolber, and Mark Jackson, among others. Lots of reliable, old-guard types who had been with the company for a long time. They did this because even though ESPN is profitable, they’re not apparently late capitalism-profitable enough, and so Disney, the media hedge fund that owns and operates this sports-media-dominating octopus, said, “Hey, it’s time to slash and burn.”

The Pat McAfee Show is the purest manifestation of the skinflint era of ESPN. McAfee is a safe-for-TV Rogan-type who runs his mouth, exudes jock-stoner energy, wanders around his studio, reacts to stuff in real time, has all his guests on via webcam, and appeals to a niche audience of goons who consume content on YouTube instead of a respectable channel surfer looking for the occasional sports hit. It’s formless, aggressively speculative, sloppy, and conversational. It’s also pretty cheap compared to a traditional studio broadcast, what with all its producers and video editors.

Cheap, niche, and kind of stupid: the ESPN of the future is here, and it sucks. McAfee has allowed himself one major expense, though: he has paid Rodgers to come on his show every week and talk nonsense so that media guys like me will write about the inane shit he says on-air and gin up attention for McAfee’s broke-dick discount-daily podcast-ass program.

In a way, Rodgers losing it is ESPN’s fault. They give him a giant platform to wander around every week, he wanders dick-first into a bunch of swamps, ESPN and their lil afternoon show get attention, and everyone marches forth, confident in their ability to ever-so-slightly increase the amount of money they can extract from ESPN, thereby proving its usefulness in the broader Disney family of products and services.

This week, McAfee announced that Rodgers was done on his show for the season because, well, he all but branded a big-name talent who works for the same parent company a pedophile, and then denied he did anything of the sort. He was back on The Pat McAfee Show the very next day.