Former NFL GM Mike Tannenbaum has piled the pressure on Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers ahead of this season, hinting that it’s essentially Super Bowl or bust. 

With 55,360 passing yards and 449 touchdowns under his belt in a career that has seen him win a Super Bowl back in 2010 and 4 NFL MVP awards during his career, Aaron Rodgers has thrust himself into the discussion of the best quarterback of his generation.

With those numbers, he puts up a rather reasonable case to be put up against the likes of Tom Brady as the greatest quarterback of all time. However perhaps the biggest thing that separates him from Brady is the number of Super Bowls that they each have, with Brady having seven in contrast to Rodgers’ one.

It isn’t necessarily through a lack of trying either. The numbers above tell you that he is doing all he can to get them another one, and he has got them to four further NFC Championship games since their trip to the Super Bowl, but through a variety of reasons, they haven’t been able to get over the line and back to the big game.

Rocky road at Lambeau

Through all of this though, despite being one of the perennial contenders in the league, stories from behind the scenes at Lambeau Field paint a rather nasty picture, with Rodgers constantly butting heads with the organisation over a number of issues, with the most prominent being the drafting of quarterback Jordan Love in 2020, which is seen as a wasted pick since it could have gone one someone to help them out immediately rather than in the future. 

Despite this though, the two sides were able to come to an agreement over a new deal this offseason that sees him tied down for the foreseeable future and will more than likely see him retire as a member of the Packers. 

And it’s that extension and belief that the team showed in Rodgers that makes Mike Tannenbaum think that this is a critical year for Rodgers.

What’s he said? 

Speaking on ESPN’s Get Up, Tannenbaum claimed that he needed to win a Super Bowl with the team this year to make the new agreement worth it for the organisation, who have clearly put a lot of faith in him to deliver now rather than building for the future:

The Packers are seen as one of the contenders for the title once again, but face a lot of competition both from within their own conference in the form of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Los Angeles Rams, who have won each of the last two Super Bowls, as well as the Kansas City Chiefs and the Buffalo Bills from the AFC.

And if he doesn’t win it this season, as he gets set to turn 39 this season, you do have to wonder if maybe the time has passed when he was in his peak years for the Packers to win it again and if they were right to give in and spend all that money on him now rather than investing on someone who could help them dominate in the future.