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It's all in the feet: Aaron Rodgers should be able to play with calf injury

GREEN BAY, Wis. -- As good as Aaron Rodgers is on the move, the Green Bay Packers quarterback doesn’t need to be fully mobile to be effective, according to coach Mike McCarthy.

But Rodgers’ latest injury -- a strain of his right calf -- will almost certainly force McCarthy to adjust his game plan and playcalling for this Sunday’s game at the Chicago Bears.

It already did after Rodgers came up gimpy after the third play from scrimmage in Sunday’s 38-10 win over the Seattle Seahawks. Rodgers threw a 66-yard touchdown to Davante Adams on the play in which the quarterback rolled out to his right, but after that he moved gingerly until he was taken out early in the fourth quarter with the outcome in hand.

Rodgers functioned well enough, throwing for 246 yards and three touchdowns despite the injury. His 150.8 passer rating was the fourth highest of his career.

“I think he showed that, just his ability to reset his feet,” McCarthy said Monday. “I mean, if you can’t reset your feet, I don’t know how you can perform. But his ability to reset his feet and extend the time clock of the route, the progression of the route concepts, was key. As long as he can do that, then we’ll be fine.”

McCarthy said Monday that he had no update on Rodgers’ calf and did not know whether he would be any more limited in practice this week than he has the past two weeks while dealing with a left hamstring injury.

“I can’t tell you,” McCarthy said. “We’re going to start game-planning here after we get done with the players. The players are in at 12:30; we’ll correct the Seattle game and kinda try to get all the medical information. It’s a normal Monday for us. I’ll see Aaron in the quarterback meeting shortly and we’ll see where he is.”

Rodgers said after the game that he didn’t know how this injury compared to the one from two years ago.

"It's hard to tell; it just happened a few hours ago," Rodgers said Sunday night. "So I'll give you a better update on Wednesday."

McCarthy’s offense might look similar to what it did late in the 2014 season, when Rodgers strained his left calf in Week 16 and battled the injury throughout the playoffs.

“The positive of him hurting his calf is we’ve been through it before -- if there is a positive in him getting hurt,” McCarthy said. “But the challenge is, and I tend to err on the side of conservative when it comes to him, and he obviously really appreciates that, as you can tell, because he wants to push it. So you just have to kind of find that common ground there, and that’s really what you do during the series when we’re not on the field, when the defense is on the field.”