To understand why Aaron Rodgers playing during the preseason doesn’t matter, one has to accept a few truths about the preseason and its value to a veteran player like Rodgers.

– Offenses run simple, vanilla schemes.

– Defenses run simple, vanilla schemes.

– Practice reps are often more valuable than preseason reps.

– Preseason results don’t matter or carry over to the regular season.

If all four statements above are true, and there’s good reason to believe all four are true, then there’s simply no reason for Matt LaFleur and the Green Bay Packers to play Rodgers on Thursday night against the Oakland Raiders or next Thursday night against the Kansas City Chiefs.

Sure, the Packers are installing a new offense. The argument for playing Rodgers is providing the opportunity to give him reps in the process of calling new plays and executing those plays in a live-game environment before the start of the regular season.

Sept. 5 is approaching fast, after all.

But Rodgers mostly destroyed that entire argument earlier this week.

“The best reps I’m going to see all summer are at practice,” Rodgers said Monday.

Why? Unlike preseason games, offenses go live in practice against defenses running their full scheme. And unlike preseason games, playcallers like LaFleur are free to run their full scheme without the worry of showing something of value to the opposition. Team periods during practice are far more “game-like” than any preseason game, even if the quarterback is wearing a red jersey and defenses don’t tackle players to the ground.

Rodgers runs the full menu of the new scheme in practice. He’d be operating the barebones of the scheme in a preseason game, and he’d be running it against simple coverages and simple blitzes in the preseason. Rodgers has been around for 14 years. There’s nothing he hasn’t seen in a game, so running 5-10 simple plays against 3-4 different looks on defense isn’t going to help Rodgers get ready for Chicago in Week 1.

The only way Rodgers playing in a preseason game could affect the start of the regular season is if he somehow managed to get injured. The balance of risk and reward is weighted completely toward risk.

It wouldn’t matter if the Packers executed a few plays and scored a touchdown. It also wouldn’t matter if Rodgers threw three straight incompletions and the Packers punted. Nothing about either result would change anything; Rodgers is already confident in the scheme.

There is possibly some minuscule benefit of Rodgers having the opportunity to hear playcalls from LaFleur in his helmet, call them in the huddle and get everyone to the line with the right urgency in a game environment. But LaFleur and Rodgers have been practicing that exact operation every day in practice, often with music blaring in the background, so it’s tough to argue there’s any significant benefit of practicing it Thursday night in Winnipeg, of all places.

“The practices are so much more important than the preseason,” Rodgers said.

That one line is probably the only thing that matters in this entire debate.