This article appears in ESPN The Magazine's Dec. 12, 2011 "Interview Issue."

FLEMING: In Week 9 against the Chargers, your third touchdown was a 21-yard pass to receiver James Jones in which you audibled out of a run play at the line of scrimmage, froze the deep safety with your eyes and then threw a ball that seemed to materialize in Jones' hands when he reached the end zone. What does it feel like to be in a zone like this?

RODGERS: It's a lot of fun. It feels fluid. I used to play baseball, and it's like when you're hitting it on the label, or the barrel of the bat. You don't feel anything, just fluid contact, and you just know you hit the ball on the sweet spot with clean power every time. When you're throwing the football the way you want to, you're not thinking about it. You're not thinking about your drop or your release point or the trajectory or where your feet are. It's just coming off your hand exactly the way you want it to, fluid and confident. You're getting good snap on it, a good spiral, and it's ending up exactly where you want it. That's when the game becomes fun, when you can put the ball exactly where you want it. You just react naturally and let all the fundamentals and muscle memory that you've built up take over. It's that feeling of being in total control.

Is part of that getting to a place where complicated reads, such as the TD to Jones, just become second nature?

It's quicker reactions and being more decisive with my checks. When you really start figuring things out as a quarterback, you realize you don't have to be perfect every time, but you do have to be quick and decisive. On that play, we had James on the left and Greg Jennings on the right. The pass check was for James to run a man-beater route -- a route with a double move that works well against single coverage. We were hoping the Chargers would go to a one-high safety look. Instead, they played more quarters, where each DB plays a quarter of the field, and they used high-low coverage on Greg. My quick reaction was that we still have man coverage on the other side with James, who is running a man-beater route. It wasn't perfect, but we still had good options to work with.

Jim Zorn once told me that each year a quarterback's motion should become simpler, shorter and smoother. Is that happening with you?

I don't know about shorter but definitely smoother. I'm at a point where there isn't any wasted movement in the throwing motion. Everything is consistent and smooth. When I first got into the league, I held the ball really high. That was the standard in college, and it messed up my timing a little bit -- the draw, bringing it back, then the release. Even in my seventh year, I'm still trying to break old habits I learned as a kid. You're taught to get back as deep as you can as quick as you can, but you can never throw the ball out on time when you do that. Learning to time up my drop with each route has been a big thing for me. It allows me to throw the ball in rhythm and hit the same release point with every throw, meaning that no matter what else is happening, the ball comes out on a similar plane. That's when accuracy comes.