Source: Warren Little / Getty
During a nearly two-hour podcast with with former teammate A.J. Hawk, Aaron Rodgers, the QB for the Green Bay Packer’s touched on that ‘mic’d up’ players.
We all have enjoyed listening to our favorite players when the NFL airs their mic’d up segments during football season, but are the mic packs safe?
Well, that’s a real question considering that Aaron Rodgers is confident that his receiver was injured during the game last season due to his mic pack.
It happened during the playoff game against the Cardinals when Randall Cobb when down in an amazing one-handed catch. The catch wasn’t accepted and the play went back, but the landing is what bruised his lung and later sent him off the field on a cart.
And this is what Cobb had to say after the game, “I made the catch. I got up and felt fine. I was walking back to the huddle, and I just noticed that it got harder for me to breathe, and then it felt like I was going to throw up. It felt like I was choking on something, so I went to throw up and then I started spitting up blood and it was kind of a crazy moment. Then I went back and got the chest x-ray. I didn’t break a rib, I didn’t fracture a rib, which is really abnormal to puncture a lung without that, but I was mic’d up for the game.
The battery pack for the mic was on my shoulder pads. I landed flush on my back during the catch, and I punctured my lung. There’s no way to prove that, but it’s kind of crazy that I punctured a lung without fracturing my rib.”
And then Rodgers made his feelings clear during that podcast interview when talking about the cause of the punctured/bruised lung on Cobb last season too… he said, “Randall Cobb had a serious injury last year in a playoff game and I believe- as I think he would as well and the team [would]- that that was cased from him being mic’d up. Because he fell on his mic pack and he had an injury to his insides that kept him out of the game and probably would have kept him out of the rest of the playoffs [had the Packers won]. The puncture spot, or the injury spot, was directly adjacent to his mic pack.”
They asked him:
In fact, we’re more likely to see it more often. After all, injuries such as the one Cobb suffered don’t appear to happen all that often. So what if everyone is forced to wear a microphone during games?
“Might have to call it a career,” Rodgers said, laughing.
But he clearly doesn’t like it in general, and not just for the chance of a fluky injury. For Rodgers, it’s making his job harder.
“Yeah, I think it’s too much information,” Rodgers said. “In 2008 there used to be no headset on defense, so the defense had to signal in every play and that was part of the whole Spygate issue and filming signals and what not. But now you have mics on both guards most of the time and you pick up everything that the quarterback says when we’re at home and sometimes on the road as well.
“I think that’s a competitive edge for the defense and it makes you have to work that much harder with your dummy words and your live and dead words. I mean, that’s part of the game there, but I think that the access is a little bit much.”
He also said that the mic’d up feature, “takes away from the authenticity of the game” and he said that it doesn’t, “feel comfortable mic’d up.”
