Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike McCarthy is trying to keep his quarterback’s latest detour into pandemic politics from hijacking training camp, saying Tuesday that his job is to keep the focus on football and winning.
The answer came one day after Aaron Rodgers appeared on The Pat McAfee Show and criticized Anthony Fauci over the former federal health official’s July Senate testimony. Rodgers called Fauci an “absolute criminal,” said he would plead the Fifth Amendment and questioned why ESPN had not devoted more coverage to the hearing and other off-field controversies, according to WTAE-TV. The Steelers, through spokesperson Burt Lauten, separately said players are entitled to personal views and that culture and politics can bring differing perspectives.
McCarthy did not endorse or rebut the substance of the quarterback’s remarks. “These are - they're grown men,” McCarthy told reporters, adding that players have different opinions; he said his job is to keep the focus on football and winning, and pointed to a player council as evidence the locker room was in a good spot, WTAE reported.
What Rodgers Was Reacting To
Rodgers’ comments followed a July 29 hearing in which Fauci repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment and declined to answer dozens of questions from a Republican-led Senate committee about his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Associated Press. The hearing also revisited competing theories about how the virus emerged, a subject that has kept Fauci at the center of political and public-health fights long after his government career ended.
Invoking the Fifth Amendment is not itself proof of wrongdoing, and the hearing did not establish that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese laboratory. The Associated Press has reported that no new scientific evidence supports lab-leak claims, while the World Health Organization says more than 7.1 million COVID-19 deaths have been reported worldwide.
McCarthy’s Football-First Reset
The Steelers have plenty riding on keeping the attention on the field. The team signed Rodgers to a one-year contract in May, bringing him back for a second season in Pittsburgh and his 22nd NFL season, according to the Steelers.
That makes McCarthy’s response less a rebuke than a familiar coaching maneuver: let the quarterback own his opinions while the coach tries to own the locker room. For Pittsburgh, the next test will be whether Rodgers’ latest national controversy fades into training-camp background noise—or becomes one more storyline competing with the football the team actually came to play.
