A college football star pursued by the revered Green Bay Packers and later recruited to be Vice President of the United States?
It’s been done. Gerald Ford.
You were thinking of Aaron Rodgers? Had in mind the surreal 2024 Presidential campaign of Robert Kennedy Jr. and his public musings to consider the still-active 40-year-old NFL quarterback as running mate?
The far-fetched idea of Rodgers somehow becoming a heartbeat away from Leader of the Free World lasted barely a week before Kennedy’s spokespeople signaled that he would go a different direction. So we never even got around to addressing the pay cut Rodgers would have to take, from a three-year, $112-million contract with the New York Jets to the Vice President’s reported annual salary of $284,000.
Although, as The Nation’s John Nichols wrote of Rodgers’ complete lack of qualifications for the job, he “couldn’t be any worse than [Dick] Cheney. Or Dan Quayle, for that matter.”
Cheney: George W. Bush’s VP. The guy who falsely alleged that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction after the Sept. 11 attacks, supported torture techniques against suspected terrorists and eventually left office with a 13-percent approval rating.
Quayle: George H.W. Bush’s Veep. Mostly remembered for dumb quotes such as “Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child” and “I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy—but that could change.”
Aaron Rodgers? As Vice President, he would make a terrific quarterback. About the only thing that made sense about a Rodgers candidacy was that, like RFK Jr., his is a widely known name. Think of Kennedy’s relentless reminders that he comes from political royalty, the son of 1968 Presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy and nephew of President John Kennedy (“Jack” to friends and family). Quayle, in a real stretch, attempted a similar association during the 1988 campaign by constantly comparing himself to John Kennedy.
“Senator,” Lloyd Bentsen said to Quayle during one Vice Presidential debate, “I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”
Prominent members of the Kennedy family have said essentially the same thing about RFK Jr. And Rodgers? Available evidence indicates that, beyond being a bold-face name in a sports-obsessed nation, his apparent value to RFK Jr. involved their sharing of wackadoodle conspiracy theories regarding Covid vaccines. And a general skepticism of authority. (Also, loyalty. Rodgers was on record that he would vote for Kennedy.)
Certainly there have been several distinguished professional athletes who became politicians without turning an ankle, notably NBA Hall of Famers Bill Bradley (18 years in the U.S. Senate) and Dave Bing (six years as Detroit’s mayor). NFL receiver Steve Largent wound up in the House of Representatives and Jack Kemp, after a long career quarterbacking the Buffalo Bills to two championships in the pre-Super Bowl AFL days, was the 1988 Republican Vice Presidential candidate running with Bob Dole. (They lost to incumbents Bill Clinton and Al Gore.)
Anyway, the football-to-highest-executive-office kind of thing had been done. Gerald Ford was a celebrated offensive lineman on two national championship teams at the University of Michigan. When he graduated in 1935, the NFL still was a year away from its first annual college player draft, but Ford was invited to try the pros by both the Packers and the Detroit Lions.
He chose instead to attend Yale law school and spent 25 years in Congress. A popular career pol, he nevertheless was something of an accidental Vice President, recruited to replace indicted tax evader Spiro Agnew during the Watergate mess. And then an ad hoc President when the disgraced Richard Nixon resigned.
The other future U.S. Presidents who had played college football were Dwight Eisenhower, at West Point, and Ronald Reagan, at Eureka College, the small private school in central Illinois, in 1930 and 1931. (At Harvard, John Kennedy played JV football and FDR was on the freshman team years earlier.) Eureka coach Ralph McKinzie later recalled Reagan as “just a fellow who wanted to play football but didn’t have too much talent.”
Aaron Rodgers, of course, was a real jock, both at Cal, where he set passing records in his two varsity seasons, and for 18 years at Green Bay. But he does not have a college degree, having skipped his senior year for the NFL draft. And he doesn’t appear to have credentials beyond the gridiron, except as a self-promoting, self-styled “critical thinker.” He has called himself a victim of “cancel culture,” “woke mobs” and media “witch hunts.”
But now that his name apparently has been removed from RFK Jr.’s short list, Rodgers could always dismiss the Vice Presidency as an unworthy goal in the first place, “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.”
But that appraisal had been done. By John Adams.