Aaron Rodgers after throwing for a touchdown in a playoff game last January against Atlanta.  GREEN BAY, Wis. — In his rookie season, in 2005, Aaron Rodgers almost never played on Sundays. Instead, he played on Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, in practice, against increasingly agitated teammates.  For Green Bay defenders, Saturday mornings were the worst. The plays for the scout team, run by Rodgers, were supposed to be scripted, the tempo purposely slow. Instead, Rodgers tossed deep passes and no-look passes and tight spirals, the kinds of throws that have come to define his M.V.P.-caliber 2011 season, which will continue Sunday on the road against the Giants.  By Week 11 of his rookie year, Rodgers said an assistant coach notified him that “the head man doesn’t appreciate all the Saturday no-look passes because you’re making the defense look bad.” He added, “He wants you to knock it off a little bit.”  So Rodgers and his merry band of scout team all-stars instead choreographed touchdown dances, which Al Harris, then a starting cornerback for the Packers, remembers well. “You’d want to rest, but A-Rod is out there zipping it,” Harris said. “He would do the championship belt dance. He would spike the ball. He was a trip.”  Now, as the best player on the N.F.L.’s last undefeated team, as perhaps the best quarterback in a league defined by the position, Rodgers recalls those days with a certain anti-Allen Iverson fondness. Yes, he is talking about practice when he says, “Those first three years were critical to my success.”  If patience is a virtue, then Rodgers’s career arc is a case study in moral excellence. He arrived at Butte College, near his hometown, Chico, Calif., as “an 18-year-old kid nobody wanted,” said Craig Rigsbee, Rodgers’s mentor, then Butte’s football coach.  Except Rigsbee wanted Rodgers. He saw his athleticism on the basketball court and the 90-mile-an-hour fastballs delivered from the pitcher’s mound. He went to every baseball game of Rodgers’s high school senior season just in case a coach from another college showed up.  Rodgers calls that season at Butte, in 2002, the most important year in his development. But even then, success was far from assured. Rodgers once told Rigsbee he wanted to become a broadcaster after his playing career ended. Rigsbee told Rodgers the biggest networks tended to hire former N.F.L. players. Rodgers winked at him.  “Looks like I’m going to have to play in the N.F.L. then,” he said. To which Rigsbee responded, “Hey, whatever.”  Yet, Rigsbee also noticed an intensity in Rodgers, an “inner burn” often masked by what teammates now describe as Rodgers’s natural, goofy bent. It is more than Rodgers’s simply hating to lose. According to his backup, Matt Flynn, when Rodgers is defeated by fullback John Kuhn in card games, he gives Kuhn the silent treatment, for hours, even days.  Rigsbee noted that inner burn on draft day in 2005, when Rodgers, after completing a record-setting career at Cal, waited and waited while 23 players were selected in front of him. General Manager Ted Thompson said the Packers hardly scouted Rodgers early on, convinced he would be gone within the first four picks.  As the draft approached, and Rodgers’s stock began to fall, Thompson said his scouting department “sat in a dark room and watched a lot of tape.” Their conclusion: they liked Rodgers as much as any player in the draft. When no team had selected him by Pick 17, Thompson allowed himself to dream.  When the Packers took Rodgers at No. 24, Rigsbee sent him a text message: Best thing that could have happened to you.  Off Rodgers went, onto the scout team, behind the most durable quarterback in N.F.L. history, a Packers legend, the grizzled veteran himself, Brett Favre. Rodgers recognized that his practice intensity “probably rubbed some guys the wrong way,” so, if anything, he increased it.  When Rigsbee visited Rodgers during his rookie season, he ate with him at the burger chain Red Robin. While two linemen from the practice squad signed autographs, Rodgers and his mentor dined without incident. Not a single patron recognized the future star quarterback.  Coach Mike McCarthy arrived in Rodgers’s second season, and he recognized the talent that spent Sundays holding clipboards. Since 1993, McCarthy has charted quarterbacks in five footwork drills that rate agility and movement. In his three backup seasons, Rodgers improved most in those areas, McCarthy said, to where he now ranks “at the top of all of them.”  In what McCarthy calls his Quarterback School, Rodgers concentrated on tuning his fine motor skills: hand-eye coordination, finger dexterity, mechanics. He also lowered where he held the ball for a smoother, more consistent motion.  By the end of Rodgers’s second year, McCarthy and Thompson saw him as a starter who happened not to start. With his quarterback coach, Tom Clements, Rodgers studied every play from the Packers’ previous season. He also took the spring practice repetitions when Favre stayed home in Mississippi.
Aaron Rodgers recalls his three years of watching film and leading the Packersâ scout team as critical to his success.