Steelers QB Aaron Rodgers acknowledges reality ahead of potential last game of his career

Week 18 of the 2025 NFL season could very well mark the end of Aaron Rodgers' legendary career.

His Pittsburgh Steelers are locked in a win-or-go-home battle with the Baltimore Ravens, and after 20 seasons and at 42 years old, there's a real chance that Rodgers finally decides to hang up his legendary cleats.

There's still football to be played, though, and this one is a big game. If Rodgers and the Steelers win, they'll win the AFC North and lock in the No. 5 seed in the AFC playoffs.

From there, anything can happen, especially when you're talking about Rodgers, who has been known to get hot. Of course, it makes sense that Rodgers is focused on this game and not getting too far ahead of himself. He does understand the reality, though. 

"I'm thinking about this week, but obviously I'm 42 years old and I'm on a one-year deal," he said on Wednesday, according to Brooke Pryor of ESPN. "So you know what the situation is. Whenever the season ends, I'll be a free agent. So that'll give me a lot of options if I still want to play. I mean, not a lot of options, but there'll be options, I would think, maybe one or two, if I decide I still want to play.

"I've enjoyed this experience, and everybody in Pittsburgh has been fantastic to me on and off the field. And it's really what I was hoping for this experience was, it's been even better than I was hoping."

If and when Aaron Rodgers retires, he'll go down as a legend

Rodgers has been in the NFL since the Green Bay Packers selected him with the 24th overall pick in the 2005 NFL Draft. He won a Super Bowl with the Packers in 2010-11 (Super Bowl XLV), and he also won four MVP awards in green and gold.

Much like how the Packers selected him early to replace Brett Favre, they did the same thing to Rodgers when they selected Jordan Love in the 2020 NFL Draft.

He mentored Love for a few seasons, and when Green Bay was ready to move on to the younger quarterback, Rodgers asked to be traded to the New York Jets.

Rodgers had two disastrous seasons in New York. The first season saw him tear his Achilles tendon after just four snaps in the season opener. In year two, the Jets went 5-12, and Rodgers looked like a shell of his former self.

He's recaptured some of that magic on this one-year deal with the Steelers, though. He'll end up retiring as a Packer, and Green Bay is where the legendary years of his career were spent, but you do get the sense that he's full of appreciation for his stint in Pittsburgh.

"You always think about the what-if and the alternative timelines of your life," Rodgers said. "But if I hadn't taken this path, I never would have met so many guys in the locker room who I now call close friends and wouldn't have the experiences and the memories on the field, wouldn't have been able to be in the room with Tom Arth again and Bake [Matt Baker] and be able to play for Arthur Smith and Mike Tomlin. And I feel like there would be a little hole in my life missing without having this chapter. So I'm thankful for this time."