Calvin Johnson didn't skip a beat over nine years in the NFL. And he didn't skip a beat during a recent appearance on the 'ALL THE SMOKE' podcast with Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson when asked to name one quarterback he wishes he could have played with.
"Aaron Rodgers."
"Played them twice a year, man," Johnson explained. "I got to see him in person, see him do the damage, shoot. I got to see him take over from Brett Favre, so I was like, shoot.”
Turns out, the feeling was mutual. Johnson said Rodgers tried to recruit him to the Packers any time they crossed paths on the field.
"You know what’s funny, man, whenever we played Green Bay, whenever Aaron Rodgers was over on our sideline, I’d just be standing there, he was like, 'Hey man, you need to come on over here.’ I was like, 'Man, I wish I could, dude,'" Johnson said with a laugh.
You can't blame him. Over the course of his nine years with the Lions, Johnson watched Rodgers and the Packers make eight playoff appearances, claim five division titles and win Super Bowl XLV. Detroit made the playoffs twice and lost both times in the first round.
As Johnson has said before, the Lions' inability to build a winner is one of the main reasons he decided to retire after the 2015 season.
"If I could have went somewhere else, maybe I would have stuck it out a little longer. But it just wasn’t worth it to me doing it there in Detroit," he said.
It's a shame. Johnson said he signed his seven-year extension with the Lions after the 2011 season "because I legitimately felt we had a chance to win that ring."
"I mean, we had an offense putting up 4 to 5,000 (passing) yards a year and we had a defensive line that featured Ndamukong Suh, Nick Fairley, a young Willie Young, C.J. Mosley. Yeah, man, we had a mean defensive line, like, O-lines, quarterbacks are scared to come play you. That’s what you need to win the Super Bowl," he said. "You need that good D-line, you need a defense that can hold up and you got an offense that can score at will, we had the makings.
"Then when everything got blown up there toward the end, we were in rebuilding mode, and that’s a wrap for me."
Johnson, 35, said it still weighs on him that "we didn't maximize the talent that we had."
"You got me on offense, you've got Stafford, you got Ndamukong Suh on defense. You got some beasts all around the team in key positions that you should be able to have a winning team. We just didn't have the winning culture, though. There's a lot more than goes into it than just having those key players," he said.
As for his ongoing rift with the Lions, Megatron reiterated nothing will change unless the team repays the portion of his signing bonus it took back after his early retirement.
"That's the reason for the rift between the team and I," Johnson said. “They made me pay some money back. The reason I don't have any involvement with them is because of that. You can't make me pay money back and then still want me to come around. It doesn't work like that."
Johnson dismissed the idea he would ever serve as an ambassador for the team under the current circumstances.
"You don’t get my services after that, after all the time I put in," he said. "You gets no more."