Aaron Rodgers' 2005 Draft Fall: How He Slid to Pick 24
Aaron Rodgers walked into the 2005 NFL Draft expecting to be picked first. He walked out at pick 24, after four and a half hours in a green room that slowly emptied around him.
It's the most famous draft slide in the sport's history, and the reason it still gets told is that everyone involved was wrong in an interesting way.
Two quarterbacks, one pick
The 2005 class came down to two names. Rodgers out of California and Alex Smith out of Utah.
Rodgers had thrown for close to 5,500 yards with 43 touchdowns and 13 interceptions in two seasons as Cal's starter, finishing with 24 touchdowns and 8 picks in his final year. Smith had thrown for nearly 3,000 yards with 32 touchdowns and 4 interceptions in his last season at Utah and finished fourth in the Heisman voting.
Scouts genuinely couldn't separate them. The San Francisco 49ers held the first pick and were split internally.
"You're making a very close decision. It wasn't a clear-cut like picking Andrew Luck," 49ers quarterbacks coach Jim Hostler told ESPN years later. "Both evenly matched players."
Mike McCarthy, then the 49ers offensive coordinator, came away from Rodgers' workout impressed. "It's the best live workout that I've still seen," he said. McCarthy would end up coaching Rodgers in Green Bay for thirteen seasons, which is one of the better ironies in the story.
The fall
San Francisco took Alex Smith.
Rodgers grew up a 49ers fan in Chico, about three hours from the stadium, and had assumed he was going home. Instead he sat down and waited.
The picks went by. Miami at two, Cleveland at three, Chicago at five. Teams that had told him some version of "if you're there when we pick, we're taking you" took somebody else. Jon Gruden, then coaching Tampa Bay, has called passing on him one of his greatest regrets.
The television cameras stayed on him the whole time, which is the part that made it legend. The green room emptied as other players got picked and left. The catering staff started clearing up around him. Chairs got stacked. Rodgers sat there with his family, in a suit, on national television, for four and a half hours.
He had reportedly joked beforehand about a bet over who'd be the last man out of the waiting room. By the end, nobody was laughing.
Green Bay, at 24
The Packers were not looking for a quarterback. Brett Favre was 35, durable, and still playing at a high level, and the roster had real needs elsewhere.
General manager Ted Thompson had started considering it about ten days out, mostly as a thought experiment. "I said, there's only two: how is either of them going to get to us?" he told ESPN. "And the one we want, how is he going to get to us?"
Green Bay used its entire allotted time at pick 24, calling around to see whether anybody wanted to trade up. Nobody did. They took Rodgers.
Packers fans were not thrilled. The team had just spent a first-round pick on a backup for a quarterback who wasn't going anywhere, while the defense needed help.
How it turned out
Rodgers sat for three seasons, took over in 2008, and built a career that answered the question permanently. A Super Bowl title and Super Bowl MVP, four NFL Most Valuable Player awards, and a place in the argument about the best quarterback of his generation.
Alex Smith had a long and genuinely good career, survived a leg injury that nearly cost him his life, and came back to play again, which is its own kind of remarkable. But the 2005 first pick is remembered as the one San Francisco got wrong.
Why draft slides matter to collectors
There's a memorabilia angle here that's easy to miss.
A player who falls in the draft is cheap to collect early, because nobody's buying a backup's signature. By the time the market catches up, the early items are gone. The people who own a 2005 Rodgers rookie-era signed piece bought it when it cost almost nothing.
That's the whole rookie gamble in one story, and the catch is survivorship. For every Rodgers there are a dozen quarterbacks who fell in the draft and then fell out of the league, and their signed items are worth what a blank jersey is worth. We laid that out in which signed quarterback jerseys are worth the money.
The reliable version of the trade is the opposite end. Retired greats have closed supply that only shrinks, which is why the rarest signatures in sports belong to people who stopped signing a long time ago.
Shop signed NFL memorabilia
We carry authenticated signed football jerseys, full-size helmets and minis from quarterbacks across every era, each with a certificate from a third-party authenticator. If you're weighing a purchase, custom versus licensed jerseys explains what you're actually paying for, and how to tell if an autograph is real covers checking one yourself.
