Aaron Rodgers Has Been More Assertive With His Scrambles

Aaron Rodgers, as you may have heard by now, has had a pretty nice four-game stretch after telling Packers fans to stop being whiny, ungrateful malcontents R-E-L-A-X. He’s deservedly getting a lot of credit for what he’s been doing with his arm. For the second half of the four-game streak, a lot of his success has been enabled by an increased willingness to pick up yards on the ground.

After Rodgers fractured his non-throwing collarbone against the Bears last season, the Packers were dismal in his absence. Despite what Mike Tannenbaum would have you believe, the combination of Seneca Wallace, Scott Tolzien, and Matt Flynn proved Rodgers’ value perhaps as much as anything that QB1 has done on the field. The team went 2-5-1 without Rodgers, and was only in position to make the playoffs because the Lions’ season devolved into the Springfield Tire Fire.

So Rodgers became keenly aware of his mortality, and the fact that any Packers success was incumbent upon his health. Though his injury last season did not come on a scramble, every hit trumps up the probability of an injury, and Rodgers returned tentative to run. In a seven-game stretch dating back to Week 17 versus the Bears last year and extending through this year’s Week 5 match-up against the Vikings, Rodgers rushed a total of 10 times for 52 yards (with zero in losses to Seattle and Detroit); in the last two weeks, he’s combined to run 10 times for 55.

A good example of the difference came in the NFL opener in Seattle. On a 3rd-and-3, Rodgers almost certainly could have picked up the first down running it. Having watched essentially every snap of his career, I think it’s fair to say there’s at least a 90% chance he would have taken off at any point in his career prior to last year’s injury. At the very least he would have hit an open Jordy Nelson on the sidelines as opposed to throwing it 10 feet over his head:

In contrast, look at this play from last week where he pump-faked Miami’s Rashad Jones out of his jock, and picked up the first down:

Four of Rodgers’ runs the past two weeks picked up first downs (three of them came on third down, and one from second), and all four of those drives ultimately ended in a touchdown. It’s not always going to work out as tidily as that, but it goes without saying that alternate methods of sustaining drives have any number of benefits, ranging from providing your defense with more rest to scoring more points.

There’s also something supremely demoralizing about doing everything right on defense only to have the opposing quarterback break contain and extend a drive. Who the hell knows how to quantify that, but it’s something that Rodgers has made a habit of doing throughout his career that Russell Wilson has turned into an art-form.

It’s a tricky rope to walk. You don’t want to turn your quarterback into a de facto running back like the Shanahans did with RG3, but there’s a happy medium somewhere that is worth the risk and can be hugely beneficial to your team. You want to minimize contact, which is easier to say when you have a panoramic view on television than when you can only see straight ahead of you and absurdly fast 350-pound behemoths are trying to break your bones.

As far as my eye test goes — and this is based on an admittedly small sample — Rodgers has been better about picking his spots the last two weeks than ever before. There used to be a lot of times where he would appear reckless, and you’d cringe in the moments after he got hit and before he got up. (A concussion sustained on a scramble against Detroit sidelined him for a game late in the season before Green Bay’s eventual Super Bowl run.) He has seemed more Wilson-ish, picking up yards while limiting his exposure, and if he can keep that up the Packers will remain difficult to beat.