The New Yorker:

The Pittsburgh Steelers gambled on the forty-two-year-old, one of the N.F.L.’s most polarizing players, to try to end their playoff disappointments. Will it pay off?

By Louisa Thomas

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.

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