3 pregame Aaron Rodgers quotes that aged like moldy cheese after loss to Vikings

2. Rodgers was pretty smug about Za’Darius Smith departing from Green Bay

Once again, Rodgers’ response could be seen as a team-friendly answer with backing Matt LaFleur, but it does come at the expense of his former teammate, Vikings linebacker Za’Darius Smith.

Go Long’s Tyler Dunne spoke with Smith in an interview this past, where Smith detailed how he was “treated bad” by the Packers:

"“How I was here in the building. I came down to here. To a nobody. To everybody in building. I was like, ‘Damn, why am I being treated like this? I brought the culture. I helped change this s—. Why the f— am I the one being treated like that?’ “Walking past me not saying nothing. ‘Z, how’s your back doing?’ There was none of that. As you can see, that adds on to why I’m on the other side. So, I can go back. I get to go back two times a year.”"

When Smith said he wasn’t treated well in the Packers building, despite his efforts to build a positive culture on the Packers defense, LaFleur said he had a “different perspective” of how things went down.

When Rodgers was asked about it, he grinned and said he’d echo LaFleur because he didn’t want to “add fuel to the fire.”

It seemed that Smith was keyed in to everything Rodgers did and didn’t say, flouting what the Packers were missed when he clocked Rodgers on a failed block attempt. Rodgers and Smith laughed it off afterward, but Smith’s move embodied the Vikings’ response to all of Rodgers’ smack talk: we’re the ones doing the owning right now.

“That’s why I’m here now,” Smith said in his interview. “So, I can play them twice a year.”

And in his first outing, he exacted plenty of revenge against his former team and teammate.