Packers’ Aaron Rodgers Throws Off Defenders With His Voice (Published 2014) (2024)

During every Green Bay training camp, an inexperienced defensive lineman rotates in for a play or two, and quarterback Aaron Rodgers stifles a laugh. He glances at the Packers’ defensive line coach, Mike Trgovac, who knows precisely what Rodgers is about to do but is powerless to stop it.

Toward the end of his cadence, just before Rodgers calls for the ball to be snapped, he articulates the word “hut” with such gusto that the poor lineman bulldozes over the line of scrimmage, goaded offside by the N.F.L.’s leading expert in pre-snap subterfuge.

Just as valuable an asset as his arm strength, mobility and microprocessor of a brain is Rodgers’s voice, loaded with bass and thump and a tinge of soul. With it, he has coaxed eight neutral-zone infractions this season — including three in the first 21 minutes against Carolina last month — by using rhythm and inflection to exploit defenders’ aggressiveness, a tactic known as a hard count.

When deployed, it puts stress on the opposition, forcing players to ponder a challenge beyond merely trying to thwart the man who has been the league’s best quarterback for the past two months. It slows the pass rush, reveals potential blitzers and helps Rodgers decipher a defense, uploading critical data about its alignment and assignments.

The tactic can enable Green Bay to steal 5 free yards via a penalty, and sometimes — in third-and-short situations, especially — that is the team’s objective. But because the play often continues after the flag is thrown, Rodgers immediately looks to throw downfield for a long gain.

“He’s a master at a lot of things,” the ESPN analyst Trent Dilfer said, “but he’s completely mastered this.”

There is, as Packers left tackle David Bakhtiari said, an element of theater involved. Any gifted practitioner of the hard count must know his audience and convince it that the ball will be snapped. Rodgers strives to do this by making every call sound — and look — the same.

He might use his normal snap count for five, 10, 15 consecutive plays before changing it; for instance, if the ball has been snapped on two, he will adapt by emphasizing the second “hut” and expecting the ball on three.

Rodgers used a hard count in high school, and again in junior college and at California, but he did not start refining the skill until reaching the N.F.L. in 2005. Backing up Brett Favre, Rodgers studied how adept Favre was at manipulating defenses with his cadence. Rodgers practiced for three years on the scout team until he became the starter in 2008.

The quarterbacks most proficient at the hard count are capable of processing numerous things before the snap — the defensive front, protection schemes, audibles — while changing the count and barking it with confidence.

Peyton Manning is considered a pioneer in this nuanced field of line-of-scrimmage verbal calisthenics, but Dilfer said Rodgers seemed to reach that level in 2011, the season after Green Bay won the Super Bowl.

That year, Rodgers tormented the Oakland Raiders into committing five penalties at Lambeau Field, where the crowd customarily cooperates by quieting down when the Packers have the ball. But he also tricked the Bears on four occasions — in Chicago. When the Packers hosted Minnesota in 2011, Rodgers duped defensive end Everson Griffen three times.

This season, Griffen was victimized twice at Green Bay in Week 5. “Just watch the ball,” he said at the Vikings’ complex last week ahead of Sunday’s loss to the Packers. “But it’s easier said than done.”

Rodgers, like Favre before him, delights in devising ways to outfox his opponents. Mindful that some defenders may not be watching the ball and may instead be keying on other potential triggering mechanisms like the center’s forearm or the quarterback’s hand, Rodgers sprinkles in some other forms of deception.

He might begin his cadence with his hands inside the warming sleeves on his waist, Dilfer said, then remove them, as if indicating that he is preparing for the snap. When the ball does not come, the safeties may have already flinched, declaring their intent and thus giving Rodgers a precious bit of information.

“He basically used a hard count to go to the defense’s mailbox, pull out the envelope, slide the envelope opener and read their confidential mail,” Dilfer said in a telephone interview. “Then he puts it back in and says, ‘O.K., I know what you’re doing; let’s go play ball.’”

What makes Rodgers’s count particularly difficult to decode, Vikings defensive end Brian Robison said, is that Rodgers has no perceptible tendencies. And if he did have them, Rodgers would know.

Besides reviewing the coaches’ film, which shows all 22 players on the field from above, Rodgers watches the network broadcast of a game. The microphones on the field improve the experience for fans watching on television, but they are anathema to a quarterback like Rodgers, who finds them intrusive, giving teams a starting point in parsing his every utterance for meaning.

He listens to his voice, trying to detect any variations in volume or inflection from his regular snap count to his hard count to his double cadence — the fake signals he chirps in an effort to expose the defensive strategy before he must call the play. When necessary, Rodgers said, he makes changes.

“That’s hard as a quarterback,” said Harrell, now an offensive analyst at Washington State. “You think, ‘I’ve got to really show this; I’ve really got to get them to jump here,’ but that’s not the approach Aaron takes.”

Green Bay’s quarterbacks coach, Alex Van Pelt, said the team maintained a running list of Rodgers’s code words and verbal cues and of any movement, however understated, that could tip off the defense. The Packers track the subtle gestures — a quick pat of his hip, perhaps — that signal a route adjustment to his receivers.

A predecessor at the position, John Elway, thrived by abruptly switching from a high pitch to a low grunt. Another authority, Dan Marino, had a voice so big and chesty that it sounded as if he were pulling the words from his gut.

Rodgers, who by nature is soft-spoken, said it took him time to learn to speak louder, deeper, fuller when calling out the snap count. Over the season, he said, his voice grows stronger. Unless the Packers are playing in a particularly cacophonous venue, like CenturyLink Field in Seattle or Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Mo., he can last a whole game without going hoarse.

As a homage of sorts to Favre, Rodgers does not wear a mouth guard. “I always thought that was a message of toughness that he was portraying,” Rodgers said, “and I always appreciated that.” As a bonus, it helps him enunciate more clearly.

That is necessary if his voice is to reach the tackles, at the ends of the line. Tasked with neutralizing the opponent’s top pass rushers, they benefit if they are able to get in their stances even a tenth of a second faster.

The primary risk in using a hard count is that it can also fool the offensive linemen, causing them to commit a false start. For the Packers, achieving the level of synchronization that Rodgers demands, and expects, requires daily maintenance.

They discuss the snap count in walk-throughs and meetings. They change it so much that during practice, a running back or a tight end may be walking around, confused, because he has not yet been notified of the new one.

Although Rodgers has the freedom to mix up the count as he pleases, he solicits opinions from his linemen. They have repaid his trust by committing only six false starts through Week 11, according to Pro Football Focus, tied for third fewest in the league.

“Aaron makes it so believable that you kind of start second-guessing yourself when you’re at the line,” right guard T. J. Lang said. “You might have a split second where you forget and hear his voice and you’ve got to watch the ball being snapped. It’s amazing what he can do.”