Rodgers unlikely to practice Wednesday, Thursday
GREEN BAY - Unless something changes, Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers will spend the next two days rehabbing his sprained right calf and not practicing with his teammates.
Coach Mike McCarthy said Wednesday that Rodgers would skip an abbreviated practice planned for inside the Don Hutson Center and probably would sit out a full workout Thursday. He said he was planning this week on having Rodgers play against the Chicago Bears on Sunday at Soldier Field.
"He'll be with the rehab group, so he won't practice today and I'll probably do the same thing tomorrow," McCarthy said. "We have a plan. Game-plan-wise, his comments were just, 'Don't hold anything back.' So we're approaching this game no different than we did last week."
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Rodgers has experience managing a sprained calf muscle. He did it late in the 2014 season when the Packers made it all the way to the NFC championship game. This injury is to his right calf, not his left, so it will affect him differently than the other one did.
Shifting all his weight onto his left foot as he throws won't be as challenging, but planting his right foot to throw might be difficult. Rodgers didn't seem to have any trouble throwing the ball Sunday in the Packers' 38-10 victory over Seattle. He had his best game of the year despite suffering the injury on the third play of the game.
McCarthy said he wasn't practicing outdoors Wednesday because of the schedule and some injuries.
"Our schedule is really driven by two things: the demand of our schedule, just where we’re at in the season with the bye week and the Thursday night game coming so early in the year, we’ve been nonstop, and our medical report," McCarthy said. "So we’ll stay inside today because we just really have the one team period that we’ll be going wide open.
"We just have a lot of teaching. But tomorrow we’ll go outside and just the way we’re structured with our facility, we can only really do the team periods outside. We’ll do everything else inside, fundamentals and so forth because we need all the space that we have there in the Hutson center so it kind of takes care of itself."
Though McCarthy didn't say whether Jared Cook would participate, the tight end was on the field when practice began. McCarthy did say there was a good chance Cook will play this weekend in Chicago after suffering a chest injury against Seattle that knocked him out of the game.
Linebackers Blake Martinez (knee), Jake Ryan (ankle) and Kyler Fackrell (hamstring) all took part in drills Wednesday afternoon. It was Fackrell's first participation since injuring the hamstring against Washington in mid-November.
Wide receiver Randall Cobb (ankle) rehabbed his ankle off to the side of the field and did not go through drills with the rest of the receivers.
Linebackers Julius Peppers and Nick Perry (hand) did not practice. Perry used an elliptical machine off to the side of the field while Peppers merely watched.
Running back James Starks (unknown) was not present for Wednesday's practice.