2026 has been pivotal for Aaron Rodgers on the home front. On his wife’s persuasion, he reconciled with his family after years of distance and an apparent split with his younger brother, Jordan Rodgers. Now, it seems like that brotherly bond has been rekindled.
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“Great to see little bro @jrodgers11 in his element tonight @acrisurestadium,” Rodgers posted on Instagram after Jordan worked Florida State’s game at Pitt for ESPN. “Really proud of how hard he’s worked to get to where he is now 👊🏻.”
Jordan has indeed come a long way in broadcasting. He joined the SEC Network in 2016 and became a game analyst on SEC Saturday Night in 2017, working with Tom Hart and Cole Cubelic.
This fall, ESPN gave him a bigger stage. He now works Friday night college football with play-by-play voice Mike Monaco and sideline reporter Dana Boyle. ESPN also named him to the ABC halftime desk with Kevin Negandhi and Booger McFarland.
A proud-brother post sounds routine, but the Rodgers family has spent years in a very public freeze.
The rift spilled out in 2016, when Jordan appeared on The Bachelorette and made clear that he and Aaron were not close. In 2017, their father, Ed, told The New York Times that Aaron had not spoken to the family since the end of 2014.
It remains unclear why exactly the quarterback distanced himself from his family.
“At times when you have some dysfunction or some separation in your family life, you have to kind of reparent yourself and give yourself what you didn’t get or wanted to hear more of when you were a kid, and I think for me, I just wanted to hear, ‘I’m proud of you,’” he said in his eponymous documentary.
“I had to find a way to be my own parent in those moments and say, ‘Hey, f— being perfect. I’m proud of who you are and what you’ve accomplished on and off the field.’ And forgiveness for all the mistakes, because I was just trying to do the best I could and a lot of times it wasn’t good enough.
It was not one fight and a quick apology. It was years of silence between a superstar quarterback and his parents and brothers.
The thaw began in recent years, when Ed traveled to watch his son play golf. Aaron has actively been trying to rebuild the once-broken bond.
In July, Rodgers posted family photos with his parents and brother Luke, captioned “Another bonding week.” Jordan was not in the pictures, but he and his wife, JoJo Fletcher, liked the post.
“It pains both of us not to have that relationship. We miss our brother. We just are trusting that God brings things full circle, and just wish that everything would just get back to us being a family,” Luke said.
Rodgers explained the shift on Cam Heyward’s Not Just Football podcast in September. He said he met his parents first, then Luke, and then Jordan a few weeks later.
“There were tough conversations for sure, but I’m just in a much better headspace,” Rodgers said.
He also said he kept the whole thing out of the spotlight on purpose.
“I decided I didn’t want to play this out in the media because I didn’t think that was right,” Rodgers said.
He pointed to fame as part of the problem, saying his family “didn’t know what it would be like to have a son who was super-famous.”
The timing is hard to miss. Rodgers said in May that the 2026 season will be his last, so the Steelers quarterback is closing out his playing career with his parents and brothers back in his life.