It's hard for me to say honestly. I certainly wouldn't say that I "want" Rodgers out. He's one of my favorite players ever and for my money the most talented player I've ever seen play the position. By and large I think many fans are going to be in for a very rude awakening when he's gone and not able to paper over some of the cracks. I'm also absolutely confident that he's not "washed up" or "past it" or whatnot. If you dropped Rodgers off in Miami or Cincinnati or KC or Buffalo and he had their passcatchers to work with I'm quite certain he'd be looking much better than he has this season, busted thumb or not.
But, that said, of course hindsight is 20-20 but it does feel more and more like perhaps the smart move would've been to trade him in the offseason and get loaded up for the future. Using the Russell Wilson trade more or less as a benchmark - Seattle got two firsts, two seconds, and a fifth PLUS Drew Lock, Noah Fant, and Shelby Harris in exchange for Russ and a 4th.
Fant this season has 30 rec for 306 yards (10.2 y/r) and 1 TD. Tonyan has 41 rec for 342 yards (8.3 y/r) and 1 TD. Fant is 25 and has a cap hit of ~2.2m this year and ~6.9m next year. Tonyan is 28 with a cap hit of 2.5m this year and I believe is out of contract after that. Shelby Harris has appeared in 9 games this season with 2 sacks and 14 solo tackles; Wyatt has appeared in 10 games with 0 sacks and 4 solo tackles. Now obviously Wyatt is a pick for the future, but getting a player like Harris in trade means perhaps you don't feel the need to spend a 1st round pick on Wyatt immediately, either. That can be invested elsewhere or rolled into further assets as needed. Drew Lock kinda stinks, but for whatever it's worth he *does* have a higher QBR/passer rating for his career than Love does. Of course Love has hardly played so that's not entirely fair, but still.
And I think the trade for Russell Wilson is probably the bare minimum we'd have gotten in a Rodgers deal; we're probably looking at all that and then some. Hypothetically speaking, you get a decent option at TE, the flexibility to not need to draft DT, and if nothing else you get a year to evaluate Love to determine if he's your guy or not. If you like what you see, you load up around him and go for it. If he's not, you have the assets to move around in the draft as needed to get one of the top prospects. Maybe we keep Davante; if he wants to leave then we're all the more loaded up with at minimum four first round picks in the next couple of drafts.
And none of that is to say anything against Rodgers whatsoever. But I do think it's looking more and more like we are more than one "piece" away from being a contender and perhaps there is some logic to the notion that the whole roster could use a bit of a re-tool from top to bottom.
In whatever case it's all more or less moot at this point. I've said it a dozen times before but the trouble is not so much that we chose to draft Love or that we chose to extend Rodgers but rather that Gute and co seem to have absolutely no conviction whatsoever in their decisions and seem to have such a crippling fear of making a "mistake" that they refuse to commit to a direction/objective/plan/etc and see it through to completion. Either move on from Rodgers, or don't. Either commit to Love, or don't. I'm sure I'm sounding like a broken record at this point but it really feels like in trying to contend in the present while preparing for the future they're going to end up failing at both.
If we went all-in on Rodgers to win-now and had to struggle through a few lean years in the post-Rodgers era, I could forgive that. If we went all-in on building for the future around Love (or just a post-Rodgers team in general) and had to struggle a bit in the present, I could forgive that. But it feels like we're simply unwilling to commit to either. Can't go all-in on the present because they're afraid of struggling in the future and can't commit to building for the future because they're afraid of struggling in the present. And that sort of noncommittal, non-courageous leadership isn't really leadership at all TBH.
