Written by Bill Barnwell at ESPN.com
For the second time in five seasons, the entire state of Wisconsin hinges on a single broken collarbone. One thousand four hundred forty-four days after Aaron Rodgers broke his collarbone on Monday Night Football in a 2013 loss to the Bears, the Packers’ future Hall of Fame quarterback suffered the same injury to his other clavicle in a brutal loss to the Vikings on Sunday afternoon. The team’s official Twitter account suggested Rodgers could miss the remainder of the season, but unless the Packers get lucky over the next couple of months, it might not matter.
Mike McCarthy & Co. were able to overcome Rodgers’ previous collarbone fracture and win the NFC North, although that run required several improbable twists and turns. The Lions blew a division that seemed to be theirs for the taking, as they had a comfortable advantage with tiebreakers before losing to the 2-8 Bucs at home, falling to a 61-yard game-winning field goal by Justin Tucker, and blowing a fourth-quarter lead with a pick-six before losing to the 5-9 Giants in overtime. The Bears then inherited the top spot in the division and held a 28-27 lead in the fourth quarter over a returning Rodgers with 46 seconds left, only for the Chicago secondary to wildly blow its coverage on fourth-and-10and give Randall Cobb a free pass to the end zone for a division-clinching touchdown.
If you’re a Packers fan looking to find reasons to believe Green Bay will be able to overcome Rodgers’ injury and repeat as division champions, I can find a few. For one, this injury is earlier in the season than his previous collarbone break, which came in Week 9. When I wrote about that clavicle injury, I looked at quarterbacks who went down with fractures in the past such as Troy Aikman, Elvis Grbac and Tony Romo. Since then, Romo broke his collarbone twice during the 2015 season, while Josh McCown went down with a fractured clavicle of his own last season.
There are no guarantees on how quickly a collarbone will heal, and Rodgers would miss the rest of the season if he elects to have surgery. If doctors advise that Rodgers can heal with rest, though, the data points from those passers suggests Rodgers will miss between six and eight weeks. That timeline would set up Rodgers to return as early as Week 12, but more likely Week 14 in Cleveland against the sputtering Browns. With what was described at the time as a “small” fracture of his left collarbone in 2013, Rodgers missed seven weeks before returning for the season finale against Chicago.
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