GREEN BAY, Wis. — A simple, seemingly innocuous question to Aaron Rodgers led to hilarity in the Packers’ locker room Thursday: Who is your all-time favorite Bear?
Rodgers readily answered with Hall of Fame linebacker Brian Urlacher, then rolled into a story about his hijinks in a 2009 game at Lambeau Field. Every time Rodgers called out a change at the line of scrimmage, without exception, Urlacher would call one for the Bears’ defense.
But Urlacher’s calls didn’t sound like football plays.
“The checks he was saying were super inappropriate,” Rodgers said. “I think it was [before] the mic’ing up of the guards, where every single word is heard, because I promise you if that had happened today, you know, some of that stuff would’ve had to get bleeped out.
“One of the first times we played golf in [Lake] Tahoe, we joked about some of those checks. I can still remember some of the crazy stuff he was saying out there. I just always wondered, ‘Was any of that stuff real or were you just [messing] around?’ We had some good laughs about that.”
So which was it?
“He said a lot of it was real,” Rodgers recalled. “They would come up with them specifically for Packers week because he knew he had a beat on — well, he said he did, but I told him we were dummy checking sometimes — but he said he had a beat on when we were checking. And they would come up with specific dirty checks to combat anything we were trying to do.”
Apparently the calls were so vulgar that Rodgers couldn’t give even a watered-down example.
If Urlacher did decode Rodgers’ checks, it didn’t help enough. The Bears held Rodgers to 17-of-28 passing for 184 yards and a touchdown, but the Packers won 21-15.
