Steelers Insider Gerry Dulac: Pittsburgh Fans Want to Move on from Aaron Rodgers

If you polled Pittsburgh Steelers fans on the Aaron Rodgers waiting game, Gerry Dulac would put the move-on number at 80 percent.

The Steelers insider came on the show and walked Rich through why the fan base has run out of patience, while the people inside the building have not.

Rich asked Dulac if he had any dart throw on why the deal still has not closed.

"Part of it is because it's, let's face it, it's Aaron Rodgers, and he does things differently," Dulac said. "And I'm not going to lay it off simply as that, but it's kind of been his history."

The evidence Dulac keeps coming back to is real estate.

"He never sold his house here, Rich, and he hasn't cleaned out his locker," Dulac said. "Now, does that mean he's definitely coming back? Well, it's probably a good indication that he is."

If he is coming back, Dulac said, the delay does not have an obvious reason.

"Why don't they agree to the deal and then just say, look, he doesn't need to be here," Dulac said. "Or, if he wants to show up and shake some hands and meet the new coaches, probably many of whom he already knows, I don't see what the problem is with that."

The optics, in Dulac's read, are getting harder to defend.

"They have said all along that they did not expect this to be a repeat of last year, when he signed on June 5th," Dulac said. "Well, it's tracking in that direction right now. And when the owner comes out and says, told me at the owner's meetings that he expects him to be here by the start of the NFL draft, and he doesn't sign by the start of the NFL draft when the owner says he expects him, it just doesn't look good. Am I going to sit here and say it's embarrassing? No. But the optics aren't great."

That's where Dulac's fan-base sense kicked in.

"Rich, if you pulled the fan base here, I bet you 80 percent, well, I know from listening to them, 80 percent of them want to just move on and let's let the young kids play," Dulac said.

He acknowledged immediately that the NFL does not operate that way.

"Well, this isn't a college program," Dulac said. "That's not going to happen. But if it happened, I don't think there would be a large percentage of the fan base that would be upset with it."

Rich pivoted to the relationship between Rodgers and Mike McCarthy. Old grievances. New project. How is the chemistry?

Dulac said McCarthy talks about Rodgers with a smile.

"When he talks about Aaron, he talks so with a big smile," Dulac said. "He claims he talks to him, and I don't doubt him, that he talks to him several times a week. He says he's in constant communication with Aaron. So I would imagine if it's constant, that they're on the same page with whatever it is they're talking about."

Dulac said the part of the Rodgers narrative he can actually verify is what happened inside the Pittsburgh locker room last year.

"Everybody read some not-so-great things about Aaron Rodgers and how he is internally," Dulac said. "And I can tell you that locker room in Pittsburgh absolutely loved having Aaron Rodgers around. All the things they heard, how standoffish he can be, that he's a different duck. He was anything but. And so the players really embraced him."

Rich said he has heard the same thing from Cam Heyward on and off the show.

Dulac gave the specifics.

"He was an open book here," Dulac said. "He encouraged the players, you know, hey, at training camp, you want to come down, my door's open, come down and talk. He would go walk in on the players and chat with them. I'd see him in the cafeteria, not only talking to the players, but talking with groups of people who weren't players, who weren't coaches. He was trying to be very accessible and very approachable and communicative."

The case for Rodgers, in Dulac's reporting, is that the local read on the man was the opposite of the league-wide narrative.

"What I saw was somewhat of complete opposite of what I had heard about him," Dulac said. "And that's kind of why he was doing what he was doing."