Aaron Rodgers was supposed to be talking about his final NFL season. Pat McAfee lobbed the softball. The four-time MVP and 22-year veteran had other plans.

"I'm going to plead the fifth. Like that absolute coward, Tony Fauci. Absolute coward."

That was the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback on ESPN's "The Pat McAfee Show" on August 3rd, days after Dr. Anthony Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment 111 times during a Senate Homeland Security subcommittee hearing. Sen. Rand Paul, who chairs the committee, hauled Fauci in to answer for pandemic decisions that Fauci's own diary entries have since complicated considerably.

Rodgers wasn't done. "Are you kidding me? You got a pardon and you pleaded over 100 times at the White House? What are you scared of, Tony? I thought you were the science. I thought, 'I am science,' and you get up there and you can't answer a question? What are we doing?"

The line he was mocking — "I represent science" — was Fauci's own, from a 2021 Face the Nation interview. The man who made that claim invoked the Fifth 111 times rather than defend it under oath.

Rodgers went further. "Tony Fauci is an absolute criminal." And on the pandemic's origins: "COVID was made in a lab in China — that's not even questionable anymore."

Then he turned the camera on the network airing him. Rodgers noted that ESPN devoted weeks of coverage to his 2021 vaccination controversy — when he told reporters he was "immunized" before it came out he hadn't received an Covid vaccine, triggering a mandatory 10-day quarantine. He wants to know why the Fauci hearing got a fraction of that attention.

"What are you going to say about me now?"

He also challenged Travis Kelce — whom he's previously called "Mr. Pfizer" for appearing in a vaccine commercial — to a debate, suggesting he team up with HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. against Kelce and Fauci. "I feel great about it," Rodgers added. "I told you I would be on the right side of history." In a 2023 interview he'd been even more direct: "If science is Dr. Fauci, you're damn right I'm defying science."

Fauci's camp responded the next day. His attorney, David Schertler, emailed The Athletic: "Aaron Rodgers doesn't know what he's talking about. He should stick to football."

Steelers head coach Mike McCarthy offered a similar sidestep when reporters pressed him. "These are grown men. They all have different opinions," he said. "But at the end of the day, my job is to keep it about football."

The people who want this story to go away keep saying the same thing: stick to football. Aaron Rodgers has 111 reasons to disagree.