The Pittsburgh Steelers, eager to cast off whatever traces of cultural relevance they once had, announced on Wednesday that they were willing to wait for quarterback Aaron Rodgers to help ease them into a quiet, lonely death.
“I’m optimistic we can get a deal wrapped sometime within the next three to 100 days,” said GM Omar Khan. Khan told reporters that he recognizes that the team’s fans have been waiting a long time to become just as disaffected with the Steelers as they have been with the Pittsburgh Pirates. “But trust me, we’re working on it,” he said, offering the cameras a sly wink. “Just give us a little longer.”
Team owner and president Art Rooney II seconded Khan’s assurances. “It has long been the dream of both myself and the Rooney family to watch our beloved Steelers flop around like a fish for months on end, until they run out of oxygen and at last fall, deathly silent, into the afterlife, unnoticed and unloved.” Rooney told the press he was “disappointed” by the team’s 2025 campaign, which included a number of “overly ambitious throws downfield” and “a division title that none of us actually wanted to win.”
“But when Aaron comes back, we’re confident he’ll spend the entire season languishing in the pocket like a dead squirrel before dumping off a screen pass that travels exactly four yards sideways,” Rooney said. The owner is confident that this new, even more dilapidated Rodgers will help the franchise reclaim its toilet days of the 1980s, when the team’s on-field play was so ghastly that your grandfather fell headlong into a fatal case of alcoholism.
New head coach Mike McCarthy—hired by the franchise to so thoroughly disgust locals that they won’t be even able to muster the energy to wave a Terrible Towel around in the air for any measurable length of time—was even more emphatic about Rodgers’s coming arrival.
“Oh, he’ll be here,” said McCarthy, fielding questions while getting a vigorous calf massage from a team staffer. “I didn’t take this job to get along with my players and win games in the postseason. I came here to render this entire organization spiritually comatose. Wait ’til I send Aaron out there to catch an option pass. You’ll ask the first person you see to bury you alive.”
When asked by reporters if he’d mended fences with the quarterback after an apparent falling out when both men were with the Green Bay Packers, McCarthy replied, “Not a lick. He still hates my guts, and I still think he’s a pathetic little nancy boy. And you have my word that we’ll never resolve our differences, and that we’ll spend all of the coming season passive-aggressively lashing out at one another in the press.”
“Can you move down to the toes now?” he asked the staffer. “These little piggies need some TLC.”
The Steelers, who beefed down their offense this offseason by adding RB Rico Dowdle and WR Michael Pittman Jr., have been waiting on Rodgers’s decision ever since the team’s 30-6 playoff drubbing at the hands of the Houston Texans in January, a loss that Rooney described as, “Suitably forgettable, but still tragic in that it happened at all.”
Rodgers, last seen headed to Steelers team headquarters and then not, has reportedly told friends that he’s in “the most adequate shape of his life,” and that he plans on returning to the team “once I’m off my meds.” On Tuesday, the future Hall of Famer told ESPN host Pat McAfee that he’s intrigued by the idea of becoming the “true patient zero” of a nationwide hantavirus outbreak, but that, “I’ve still got some horrible football left in me, brother.” He added that while the hantavirus is, indeed, an effective spreader of death, such a quick and gruesome demise “really isn’t the Steeler Way,” and that he’d rather local fans die by falling into an inescapable depression after watching their quarterback spend another season failing to register a better PFF grade than Spencer Rattler.
The quarterback added that he’s already had his wife Xmerelda craft a series of dolls of his would-be new teammate Pittman to burn in effigy.
“I don’t know what he’s gonna do to piss me off, but it’ll be something. I know that,” Rodgers said.
In the event that Rodgers doesn’t sign with the team, Steelers brass intends on staging a heated training camp battle for the starting quarterback job between second-year nobody Will Howard and tragically underwhelming rookie Drew Allar. Recent reports indicate that McCarthy has taken a special interest in Allar, who suffered a season-ending ankle injury during his final season at Penn State.
“He’s already got the gimpy leg,” McCarthy said cheerily, adding that Allar also has a “terrible work ethic” and that “watching him needlessly throw 50 passes a game” will prove equally stultifying to watching Rodgers, now so chronically ineffective that his mere visage triggers suicidal ideation in others.
But, the coach added, he doesn’t think it will come to that.
“When Aaron is ready to come in and get to whining like a maimed infant, we’ll be ready. That’s a promise.”
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