Rastall Ramblings: NFL Misses Opportunity For Rodgers/McCarthy Farewell

There’s a certain inherent buzz to the first week of preseason games since it marks the return of football after six months away, plus these games carry importance for the rookies getting their first taste of NFL action and for the players who are locked into positional battles or fighting for roster sports.

Beyond that, there’s not a whole lot of intrigue — the gameplans are typically as vanilla as can be and the league’s best players either are barely playing or sitting out entirely because the injury risks aren’t worth the limited benefits.

So, when a genuinely compelling storyline presents itself, you’d hope the league would fully seize on it. That was not the case with the game between the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers last Thursday.

Green Bay went on the road for its preseason opener at Pittsburgh’s Acrisure Stadium, representing a major missed opportunity to have Aaron Rodgers and Mike McCarthy begin their 2026 reunion tour with a visit to their old stomping grounds of Lambeau Field.

This seemed like such a slam dunk that it’s hard to believe it didn’t happen. It’s only preseason football, rearranging the schedule a bit to make sure the Steelers visited Green Bay wouldn’t have been asking the world.

An otherwise forgettable preseason game could have been both a national spectacle and an enduring memory for Packers fans to give a proper curtain call to the head coach/quarterback duo that helped bring the Lombardi Trophy back home 16 years ago.

If Rodgers was making his return to Green Bay, last Thursday would have surely marked the hottest preseason ticket in Lambeau history. It could’ve even gone a step further. A joint practice leading up to the game itself would have allowed Rodgers to partake in the training camp bike ride one final time and afforded both Rodgers and McCarthy the opportunity to be around Green Bay for a bit.

And if the game were being played at Lambeau, we would’ve surely seen at least one drive of Rodgers under center for the Steelers rather than him staying on the sidelines the whole game.

McCarthy, of course, got his Green Bay return in 2022 when he was coaching the Dallas Cowboys, which also turned out to be the final season in a Packer uniform for Rodgers.

However, the chance for Rodgers to play at Lambeau Field never lined up. The Packers and Jets didn’t play during his brief time in New York. The Packers and Steelers did meet last season to give us the highly sought-after primetime matchup between Rodgers and Jordan Love, but that game was in Pittsburgh as well.

Last week’s preseason game wasn’t a total loss. We had the opportunity to hear both Rodgers and McCarthy reminisce a little bit about their time in Green Bay and saw them converse on the field with a few familiar faces that are still with the Packers organization. But even Rodgers himself said he wished the game had been in Green Bay. Now, we’re all but guaranteed that he never gets that Lambeau return as a player.