FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Sunday, October 9th, 2016
FOOTBALL NIGHT IN AMERICA FEATURES MIKE TIRICO’S INTERVIEW WITH GREEN BAY PACKERS QUARTERBACK AARON RODGERS
“There’s nothing like a night game…It’s going to be a raucous environment and one that I don’t ever take for granted.” – Rodgers on Lambeau Field for Sunday Night Football
STAMFORD, Conn. – Oct. 9, 2016 – For tonight’s Week 5 edition of NBC’s Football Night In America, the most-watched weekly studio show in sports, host Mike Tirico interviews Green Bay Packers QB Aaron Rodgers. Football Night will also include highlights, analysis and reaction to earlier Week 5 games ahead of tonight’s Giants-Packers Sunday Night Football showdown.
Football Night airs each Sunday at 7 p.m. ET on NBC. Tirico will host tonight’s program live from Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wis. He will be joined on site by Sunday Night Football analyst Cris Collinsworth and sideline reporter Michele Tafoya.
Dan Patrick co-hosts Football Night from NBC Sports Group’s Studio 1, and is joined by Hall of Fame head coach Tony Dungy, two-time Super Bowl champion Rodney Harrison, and Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk on NBCSN, NBCSports.com and NBC Sports Radio. Paul Burmeister will report from AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, on the Bengals-Cowboys game.
INTERVIEW: Below are excerpts from Tirico’s interview with Rodgers. If used, please note the mandatory credit: “In an exclusive interview airing tonight on Football Night in America.”
AARON RODGERS WITH MIKE TIRICO
On how he keeps the team calm after a bad game: “That’s our league now. You can’t pay attention to that. It’s about playing the right way. It’s about our offense, our guys, and making it look the way we want it to look. The other opinions out there, they’re going to be there. It’s white noise for us. We try to keep the blinders on and stay focused on what we have to do to be successful.”
On New York Giants head coach Ben McAdoo, who worked with Rodgers at the Packers as QB coach for two years: “It was fun working with Ben. I saw him as a young coach. We had some fun with him, we’d rib each other a lot. We had a great quarterback room both those years and got to really see him open up his personality. He’s got a great sense of humor. At his core, he’s a grinder. His attention to detail was incredible. There was nothing that didn’t get touched on. I always appreciated that about Ben, and I always appreciated the back-and-forths. He’s always one for a good quip, if you kind of try to take a shot at him. I always appreciated that in his personality.”
On whether the appreciation he has for getting to and winning a Super Bowl is growing: “Painfully so. When you win it, and you go there, you think it’s going to be like that every single year. We follow that up with a 15-1 season, No.1 team in the playoffs, and get beat in our first game. We realized how special that opportunity is and how the difference between winning and losing is so tight in this league.”
On playing at Lambeau Field: “When you play here, it’s not a cliché, there’s no place like home. It’s a special place. I look forward to every opportunity to run over those bricks in the tunnel that the greats have run over in all the years of Packer football. There’s nothing like a night game, Sunday night. There’s nothing like a game like that, where you know the fans have been having a good time all day, they’re excited about the game and looking forward to it. It’s going to be a raucous environment, and one that I don’t ever take for granted, never know when it will be my last time running out here. I hope I have many, many more, but it’s a special place.”
–FOOTBALL NIGHT IN AMERICA–
