Mike McCarthy Drafted Drew Allar To Replace Aaron Rodgers. Aaron Rodgers Just Showed Up In Pittsburgh.

Aaron Rodgers landed in Pittsburgh on Friday, May 8, with no signed contract, no scheduled meeting with team ownership, and a one-year, roughly fifteen-million-dollar restricted free agent tender that the Pittsburgh Steelers issued in March. He is forty-two years old and turns forty-three in December. He missed one game in 2025 — a Week 12 loss to the Chicago Bears — after fracturing his wrist against the Cincinnati Bengals. Two weeks before his arrival, the same front office spent the seventy-sixth overall pick on Penn State quarterback Drew Allar. A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette report Saturday confirmed Rodgers was in town but had still not spoken to anyone in the building. The visit was expected to extend through the weekend. The succession plan, in other words, has been drafted, scouted, and announced. The starter has not yet agreed to start it.

Mike McCarthy was hired as the Steelers' fourth head coach since 1969 in mid-January, days after Mike Tomlin stepped down on January 13 from a nineteen-season run. McCarthy is sixty-two, a Pittsburgh native, and walks in with a career head-coaching record of 185-123-2 across the Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys. The hire was a deliberate departure: Tomlin, Bill Cowher, and Chuck Noll were all young, defensive, first-time head coaches when Pittsburgh hired them. McCarthy is none of those things. Team president Art Rooney II said publicly the Steelers wanted to compete from day one and that he disliked the word rebuild. The connection most outside the organization fixated on, though, was Green Bay. McCarthy coached the Packers from 2006 through early December 2018. Aaron Rodgers was his quarterback for eleven of those seasons.

The Allar selection in late April clarified the kind of quarterback room McCarthy wanted. Allar is six-foot-five, two-hundred-twenty-four pounds, the former Penn State starter, and the only quarterback Pittsburgh took inside the top hundred picks. Spotrac projects his four-year deal at roughly seven-point-one million dollars. Steelers insider Mark Kaboly reported the day after the draft that McCarthy had personally pushed for Allar over Will Howard, the sixth-round 2025 pick from Ohio State who led the Buckeyes to a national championship the previous January. Kaboly's framing was specific: Allar was hand-picked by McCarthy and is expected to take over as the Steelers' starter in 2027. As of Saturday afternoon, Allar had not yet signed his rookie contract — one of four Pittsburgh draftees still waiting on a finalized deal.

The Green Bay history is the part that complicates the photo op. McCarthy was the San Francisco 49ers' offensive coordinator in 2005 — the year San Francisco took Alex Smith with the first overall pick instead of Rodgers, who slid to twenty-fourth and Green Bay. McCarthy was hired by the Packers a year later. Rodgers, by Tyler Dunne's account in his 2019 Bleacher Report deep dive, loathed McCarthy from the moment of the hire. An unnamed Packers source put it more bluntly: "Mike has a low football IQ, and that used to always bother Aaron." The two won Super Bowl XLV together in February 2011. They also spent thirteen years in a working partnership one Packers staffer told Dunne was held together by mutual proximity to a Lombardi Trophy and not much else. McCarthy was fired in early December 2018.

The current Steelers quarterback room — assuming Rodgers signs — runs five deep. Mason Rudolph is on the roster as the veteran backup. Skylar Thompson came over from the Miami Dolphins for the 2025 season after two years as a Dolphins starter-of-last-resort. Will Howard is the holdover from the 2025 draft. Drew Allar is the new project. The actual depth chart is sequenced rather than competitive: Rodgers in 2026, Allar in 2027 if everyone is right, with Rudolph as veteran insulation and Howard and Thompson as the camp arms. McCarthy's offensive history says he prefers a single-quarterback room with a clearly defined heir behind it; Pittsburgh just gave him both. The unsigned half of the room — Rodgers at the top, Allar at the bottom — is what makes the picture awkward this weekend rather than orderly.

The leverage in the Rodgers contract is now visible to anyone reading the depth chart. The Steelers have a starter in mind for 2027 already drafted and on the property. They want Rodgers for one year at the rate the rest of the league is willing to bid him, which is currently nobody at all. Rodgers wants closer to twenty million dollars, multiple reports confirmed Saturday. Mike McCarthy told reporters in February that a Rodgers reunion in Pittsburgh would be "a great story." He did not say which kind of story. The press conference, when it eventually happens, will need to skip past the part where the new head coach drafted his starter's replacement before the starter agreed to come back. The first answer to the first question will tell the room how that conversation went.